Coaching insight!

Cognitive coaching is an example of legitimate teacherly authority

‘Relevance realisation’, according to the cognitive scientist, John Vervaeke, is the process that underpins our cognitive capacities, is the basis for insight, which, in turn, is an essential component for creativity, one of the key twenty-first century skills.

You can see relevance realisation taking place in the youngest of children and, Vervaeke claims, the state of ‘flow’ (where we are wholly engrossed in an activity, and time passes without our noticing) is a ‘cascade of insights’.

What has this to do with teacherly authority?

Well, a lot.  Cognitive coaching is an example of teacherly authority: the coach has a greater capacity which they want to teach, the coachee recognises and values this capacity and agrees to pay attention to the coach.  All four conditions for legitimate teacherly authority are in place.

You have probably already guessed that the capacity that the coach has is the ability to help the coachee develop insight so that they can resolve whatever has caused them to get stuck and to take action to move forward.

Developing insight

We are using cognitive coaching to strengthen adult capacity for insight and, at the same time, developing the capacity to teach it.

Cognitive coaching only began to appear in education circles earlier this century (Andrew Mowat and I developed a cognitive coaching methodology back in 2006 - and have used it continuously since then) and is now widespread.

I think we can legitimately see this development as one of the threads in the rebuilding of teacherly authority in schools.

Still a long way to go, though.

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 concept and practice of teacherly authority.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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