A new paradigm!

Getting the best of both worlds

In his 1990 paper* ‘Reforming Again, Again, and Again’, Larry Cuban laments the fact that the same attempts at educational reform keep being repeated and especially such reforms have swung between teacher-centred approaches to student-centred approaches and back.  This history suggests we need to emphasise one pole or the other and we cannot have both at the same time.

But we can.

The teacherly authority approach affords both teacher and student freedom of choice.  The teacher offers to teach some capacity that is valued by the student and the student freely agrees to enter the social dynamic whereby they agree to pay attention to the teacher and to wherever the teacher directs their attention.  Once the dynamic is in place the teacher can direct student attention to the subject they want to teach.

The crucial step is that what the teacher offers is a capacity that a young person needs to grow into adulthood (I identified four core capacities in some earlier postings that emerge during childhood and that are central to healthy growth, you can see them here, here, here and here).  These capacities also generate all the Competences and Character Qualities that round out the Foundational Literacies in the WEF’s expression of twenty-first century skills.

We can have the best of both worlds but to get it we must embrace a new paradigm that, finally, leaves behaviourism and its residual influences fully behind us.

Registration for the one-day program (Re)Building Teacherly Authority on 18th August is now closed.  There will be at least one further program in Term 4. To get a fuller overview of Teacherly Authority, go here.

* Educational Researcher Vol. 19, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 1990), pp. 3-13 Published By: American Educational Research Association https://doi.org/10.2307/1176529

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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