Value commitment!

How we learn to value commitment

Here is a quote from Margaret Mead* which perfectly addresses the issues facing education today:

“Now, with our greater understanding of the process, we must cultivate the most flexible and complex part of the system—the behavior of adults. We must, in fact, teach ourselves how to alter adult behavior so that we can give up postfigurative upbringing, with its tolerated cofigurative components, and discover prefigurative ways of teaching and learning that will keep the future open. We must create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn, not what they should be committed to but the value of commitment.”

We are seeing this first shift with changes to curriculum and pedagogy within the framework of twenty-first century skills.  The second, less so.  A majority of adults in all walks of life are not engaged in their work, without this level of commitment they cannot demonstrate the value of commitment to young people (and the cycle continues).

At the very least, we want our teachers to model the value of commitment by being highly committed whilst not demanding that young people themselves necessarily conform to a given point of view.

We know teachers who are passionate about their work inspire young people.  We also know that teachers who commit to listening closely to their students also inspire young people.

Thus, an effective way to stimulate this shift is by the systematic collection and use of student feedback to individual teachers.  When this is systematic then it is valuable at the individual teacher level, it allows for the creation of a common language, and it allows school leaders to see an engagement profile for the whole school, or at least a representative sample, to inform decisions about professional development and what to emphasise in communication to teachers.

In the spirit of this I am presenting a webinar on Thursday 3rd March at 12 pm (click here to register) which will consider why the collection and use of student feedback is such an important tool for managing engagement.

In anticipation of this event if you would like a complimentary copy of my book Student Feedback, please email me with your postal address.

 *Mead, Margaret, Culture and Commitment: the new relationships between the generations in the 1970s New York: Columbia University Press 1978, Chapter 4 page 87.

 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