Teacherly authority in action!

Coaching is a perfect example of teacherly authority in action

I first became interested in enlightened teachers in 2001.  It took several years to understand enough of what they were doing differently to develop a cognitive coaching methodology which emulated their capacity for listening and always responding with compassion and in the best interest of their students.

I did not realise at the time, but coaching is a good example of teacherly authority: the coach has a capacity that they want to teach in the best interest of the coachee, the coachee values the capacity and agrees to pay attention.

Coaching clearly works yet it has taken a long time to fully realise why. It is now clear that coaching is structured as a relationship of teacherly authority, with the coach providing all four of the core capacities.

The coach demonstrates caring by how they listen to the coachee.  They demonstrate the capacity for eliciting insight from the coachee by the questions they ask and how they ask them.  They model active open-mindedness by helping the coachee face up to challenging thoughts and thereby gain clarity on what they need to do – their goal.  Finally, the coach helps the coachee to get things done by helping them set out the steps they need to take to achieve their goal.

To be a good coach you need to have the four capacities yourself and the act of coaching helps you to further develop them or indeed develop some of them from low levels.

I have always argued that coaching only exists because we don’t have conversations of this type as a matter of course.  I am now convinced that enlightened teachers do have such conversations as a matter of course, they are not formal, they may only take seconds or minutes but they are ongoing and valued by their students.

We really do have everything we need to move intentionally towards teacherly authority as the basis for mediating all our relationships.

Learn about Teacherly Authority 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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