Get perspective!

The importance of developing perspectival knowing

I have described various aspects of perspectival knowing here, here, here and here and why it is a necessary component of twenty-first-century skills.

One of the values of having data about many aspects of day-to-day school and classroom operations is to be able to ask the question “have you noticed that …?”.  A question that brings a new item into our salience landscape, that is, it has the possibility to stimulate our perspectival knowing.

Incidentally, this is one of the areas where technology has great potential, using artificial intelligence to find patterns in the data on a routine basis and posing the same question.

Some staff will ignore such questions and go on as before, but some will pause a moment and new possibilities will begin to emerge.In the taxonomy that I develop in my latest book Why We Teach; on average these responses are 60:40 in favour of ignoring the question.

What is the difference between these two responses?  For me, it is how well developed is the individual’s capacity for perspectival knowing.

How can we improve this?  One popular pathway is to use the various forms of action inquiry or agile sprints that stimulate the capacity for inference and highlight the value of trying something new.  But are they really getting at perspectival knowing or are they mainly focused on improving procedural knowing i.e., practice?

The other pathway is to address the blockages to improved perspectival knowing which come back to regulating the red brain so that our responses can consistently be considered and autonomous rather than impulsive and pre-programmed.

Of course, we need to do both.

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.

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