We must all engage!
Engagement is the foundation for building modern capabilities
What does it mean to be disengaged from our work? It means minimal critical thinking, creativity, or collaboration yet these are the capabilities that we want students to learn. The capabilities that underpin twenty-first-century skills.
When these capabilities are not being modelled by every teacher it is hard for every student to learn them.
About 60% of employees on average are not engaged, which includes employees in education. This latter fact is quite surprising as we humans are social creatures and engaging with colleagues and students, as other humans, will naturally lead to collaboration, creativity and critical thinking.
Why is that? you might ask.
Because every human is unique and if we pay attention to the new and the different in each other possibilities and opportunities emerge to stimulate these capabilities.
If we consider there are three areas of development in a school: curriculum, pedagogy and (almost non-existent) behaviour, then it is this latter one which is the key to optimising the other two. Yet today, the bulk of the effort goes into curriculum and pedagogy, into a teacher’s technical practice, not into the capacity to engage deeply with other people.
Maybe we think that, as humans, we naturally know how to engage deeply with other people in ways that unlock critical thinking, creativity and collaboration.
Having 60% of people disengaged even in work that is largely predicated on human relationships says otherwise.
We need to build this development in if we expect to improve outcomes.
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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