Far-reaching impact!

Many things will change as we slowly move forward

Many professions are organised so that the most senior staff are still practising their profession even whilst being in the most senior leadership positions.  Rather than having a single principal or partner, professions often have a group of partners, individually and collectively accountable for the success of their organisation.

Recently, I was speaking with an enlightened teacher, and he said he would love to be a principal - and thinks he has the capability to get there – but loves too much being with students in the classroom.

It was then that it struck me why professions organise as they often do so that their best practitioners can also be their leaders.  Rather than having leadership responsibility ultimately resting with one principal, six principals can share it and still spend 80% of their time doing what they love.

The implications of a shift to teacherly authority will be far reaching.  In our recent joint paper*, Dr Mark Merry and I showed that the key role of the principal is to model the behaviours that the school community wants to see in its students and teachers.  If that behaviour is grounded in teacherly authority, then we need to develop those people who prefer to stay in the classroom to take on principal roles.  They will do it if they can spend most of their time still teaching.

Far reaching impact indeed.

*You can find the paper – Principal Leadership in a Time of Change – here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2022.897620/full

Learn how to make this shift at a one-day program (Re)Building Teacherly Authority on 27th October (Melbourne) and 10th November (Sydney).  For more information and to register for either event, go here.  To get a fuller overview of Teacherly Authority, go here.

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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