How to build legitimate teacherly authority - 3!

Caring for others is one of the simplest ways

I touched on caring as the basis for building teacherly authority here.

From the age of somewhere between four and six, a young child, begins to experience the emergence of a second-person perspective and its concepts of reciprocity and fairness: “If I hurt you, you can hurt me back” and “one for you and one for me”.  The child begins to learn the rules for having friends, and foundational to this, she needs to learn to care for another. 

Some of the ways that we show how we care: by making people feel safe (both physically and psychologically), by being accepting of people as they are, by being interested in them and what they are interested in, by being a good listener (a quiet mind, open to the new and different), by empathising and recognising the other’s feelings, by being compassionate, by celebrating and showing gratitude, by being accessible and supportive, by being trustworthy, dependable, reliable.

Caring for others becomes the basis for collaboration which, in turn, is both a twenty-first century skill and one of the key drivers of organisational success in the modern world.  High performing teams are characterised by having high levels of psychological safety and mutual dependability amongst team members.  Caring for others is also the basis for effective communication, another twenty-first century skill.

When we ourselves feel cared for and valued, it stimulates us to respond in kind and it is easy to see how teacherly authority can be built around providing and teaching – especially through modelling – this essential capacity.

I will be offering a one-day program in Term 3 for those teachers interested in further learning about how to develop high levels of legitimate teacherly authority and join the small minority of teachers who have a lifelong impact on their students and whose students willingly do their best work.  Stay tuned.

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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