Learning!

The third of three steps to becoming an ‘enlightened teacher’

Once a teacher is invested and helping children to get “unstuck”, then the learning teacher takes in all that they experience with striving to be fully invested and with helping children to get unstuck and uses these experiences to change their world view.  This requires the capacity for active open-mindedness, to be reflective and ground their world view in the reality of their students.

Thus, they broaden the appreciation and compassion they have for their students, and they increase their skill in helping students to re-frame their misperceptions and misconceptions, to change their faulty ways of thinking and feeling and to develop and grow.  Their capacity for unfeigned love grows deeper and stronger.

The learning teacher becomes increasingly intuitive in how they respond to children and children, in turn, only need one or a couple of interactions to know that this is a teacher they should be paying attention to – this is a teacher who will keep them safe and help them to feel increasingly safer over time - and they enter into a relationship of teacherly authority which is expressed by willingly doing their best work and self-regulating to avoid disruptions.

Behaviourism is predicated upon the teacher changing the student’s behaviour. Constructive Mutualism is more about the teacher changing their own.

The learning teacher is modelling what it means to learn beyond childhood.  What it means to be an adult who can provide psychological safety for those around them.

The invested, mentoring and learning teacher is on a virtuous cycle, changing themselves to be of ever greater value to their students.

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 providing psychological safety and unfeigned lover through operating from the Constructive Mutualist rather than the Behaviourist paradigm.  Earlier blogs can be found here.