Model it!

Some learning only comes from seeing it modelled

With propositional and procedural knowing – knowing what and knowing how, mainstays of post-war education – the educator can be detached.  It is better if they are passionate, and many are, but it is the curriculum and the pedagogy which count.

This is not the case with deeper forms of knowing.  Emotional intelligence is an expression of perspectival knowing and it is most readily learnt by an adult modelling their emotional intelligence.  For a young person to learn to separate what happens to them from the meaning they make from it, it really helps to see an adult modelling how this is done in day-to-day behaviour.

There are some things we just learn – to walk, to speak – but neither of these would occur successfully without modelling being present. Not everything can be reduced to curriculum and pedagogy, some learning – even much learning – comes from the adults modelling what it means to be an adult.

What it means to be an adult today is not what it was even ten years ago.

An adult engages with their work and strives to continually improve it - increasingly machines and algorithms can do the mundane work – which involves critical thinking and creativity.  An adult collaborates with others which involves emotional intelligence, caring, confidence in themselves.

Young people need to learn these capabilities and there is no better way than to see them modelled by adults.

If this is the case let’s make it explicit, there are plenty of good teacher role models doing this already, but they are not yet a majority. 

They do it despite the system not because of it.

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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