Just observe!

A powerful way to spread enlightened teaching practices

Enlightened teachers – whose students willingly do their best work and self-regulate to avoid disruptions - are a small minority of all teachers.  Now we have a framework that explains what they are doing to have such an effect on their students allows us several ways forward to spread these practices more widely.

An obvious one is to have other teachers observe an enlightened teacher in the classroom through the lens of a rubric that frames what the teacher is doing.  These teachers are few in number such that creating videos of segments of their lessons provides an obvious way to scale and to make the process asynchronous (others can watch at a convenient time, not just when the class is taking place).

Taking this further, a small group could observe a video together and share their reflections and voice the commitments they might make to apply new learnings to their own practice. Further still, such a group could be facilitated by a leader who models the four core capacities that underpin the enlightened teachers’ success – leaders who have developed as coaches could do this,

Developing such a process is not trivial, I know because I am involved in doing just that right now, but once in place a school will have a powerful means for the progressive adoption of the practices that define enlightened teaching.

This is such an exciting time to be involved in education.

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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