Let’s be smarter!
Tapping deeper forms of knowing
For a long time, I have been providing a one-hour, goal-setting coaching session (SMARTER Coaching) to middle and senior leaders in schools. This has been a highly successful and long-lived service, valued by those receiving it. Its effects last for a year or so making it very time efficient for busy leaders.
Only recently have I begun to realise why it has such a long-lasting and powerful impact.
In effect, the first part of the session is helping the leader map out their ‘salience landscape’ i.e., it is using and developing perspectival knowing.
The second part of the session helps the leader to find where they fit best within their world, which we have just mapped out. This over-arching goal comes from participatory knowing, a felt sense of fittedness and existentially the most important form of knowing.
We then finish the session laying out the areas where it makes most sense to use discretionary time and energy within the over-arching goal.
The result feels right and doable and underpins the focus for the year.
Most of school activity historically has been focused on propositional and procedural knowing but, in my book, Why We Teach, the teachers I classify as ‘Motivated’ are more effective than the average as they are using and modelling perspectival knowing with their students, using their own self-management to build more meaningful relationships.
The most effective teachers, those I classify as ‘Enlightened’, are developing both perspectival and participatory knowing with their students which has the same sort of impact that my coaching does. When we are clear where we fit, we can direct our time and energy in the right ways. These teachers build relationships that last a lifetime for their students.
Historically, perspectival knowing and participatory knowing were provided by religion. For whatever reason they have ceased to do this, but people’s need is still the same.
Our education systems can meet this need for our young people and their teachers.
John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter. Earlier blogs can be found here.
To purchase a copy of Red Brain Blue Brain, Student Feedback or Why We Teach go here