Transformation underway!
Rebuilding legitimate teacherly authority is the key challenge
Sensory input from the world – in a raw form - is so overwhelming that our brains have developed ways to filter the stream so that we pay attention to what is relevant for our organism to continue to live and, indeed, to have more life. Teacherly authority works in a similar way, a young person’s attention is directed to what is relevant for the ongoing success of our culture and its transmission to the next generation, to its ongoing success.
In a postfigurative culture where the young simply do what their parents (and grandparents) did, this direction of attention becomes second nature for both “teacher” and “student”. As a postfigurative culture declines and a prefigurative culture emerges it becomes very easy to fall into pseudo teacherly authority where a young person’s attention is directed through reward or punishment and legitimate teacherly authority is lost. When this happens – and it has been happening for a long while now – the old culture decays as the young pay less and less attention but the new, vital culture is impeded from emerging because what the young really need to learn is not widely on offer.
As a society we have recognised that what the young need to learn are twenty-first century skills and we have changed curriculum and pedagogy to support this.
What we have not yet done is fix teacherly authority, reward and punishment are still in use, what students really do need to learn is not what many teachers feel it is their job to teach.
The subject content matters but it will be acquired when students willingly agree to pay attention to where the teacher wishes to direct that attention and that will only come when life skills - twenty-first century skills – become the main subject matter to be taught.
It is this shift in perspective that is facing the teaching profession today.
I presented webinars on 3rd, 17th and 31st March where I made the linkage between student feedback, student engagement and teacherly authority, what we mean by teacherly authority in the modern world and how to strengthen and develop it (you can replay the webinars here, here and here, respectively).
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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