Learning life skills!

Students need to fully experience teacherly authority for the best outcomes

Using the frame of teacherly authority, we can distinguish two broad capacities that a teacher may have to a greater extent than their students – subject knowledge and what we can call ‘life skills’, which might include critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, commitment and other components of twenty-first century skills.

A second element of teacherly authority is the intent to teach, which is normally there for subject knowledge (i.e., the traditional definition of teaching) but may not be there for life skills. In other words, highly competent teachers may have both sets of capacities to a high degree, which attracts students to them, but they do not have the intent to teach life skills. Students still benefit, by imitation or emulation, but the real life-changing impact comes when such teachers consciously teach from their life skills. It is in those situations that you see a class transformed.

Reflecting on this, I think I have concluded that not only do students need life skills today more than ever (hence the emergence of twenty-first century skills as a concept) but they also need to learn how to exercise teacherly authority themselves.

To quote Zak Stein*: “Teacherly authority is a deeply rooted aspect of what it means to be human. We have had structures, both formal and informal, of teacherly authority in play for as long as we have been human. In fact, as soon as we started putting them in play is when you could say, “Oh, okay, human.””

Students learn to exercise teacherly authority themselves by being fully engaged in the social dynamic which teacherly authority represents, and to be fully engaged students must value the capacity that the teacher has, which today is increasingly their life skills.

In the webinar on Thursday, I will unpack this dynamic further.

I presented webinars on 3rd and 17th March where I made the linkage between student feedback, student engagement and teacherly authority and what we mean by teacherly authority in the modern world (you can replay the webinars here and here, respectively).  The final webinar of this series is as follows (at 12 pm AEDT):

• Teacherly Authority - how do we strengthen and build it? 31st March (register here)

*Quoted in the Jim Rutt Show Episode 57 – Zak Stein on Education in a Time Between Worlds 1 June 2020

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