Education has reached a tipping point. The Behaviourist paradigm is no longer adequate to shape behaviour and attention in the ways that are needed for young people to acquire the skills to face up to an uncertain future.  After a fifty-year journey we have reached the very edge of this paradigm and are poised to breakout into the Constructive Mutualist paradigm which is able to deliver high levels of quality student engagement and low levels of disruption.

A small minority of teachers operate in this paradigm already (and have done so for a long time) so we know that the outcomes we seek can be reliably achieved.

Amy Edmondson created the first research paper* in 1999 on the role of psychological safety in organisations showing, in a medical context, that there were fewer mistakes and fewer adverse consequences for patients where psychological safety was higher amongst medical staff.  In short, teams learnt better practices.

Her 2018 book – the fearless organization – pulls together her considerable body of work along with parallel research by others.  A clear outcome is that having psychological safety enhances engagement, learning and performance.

I have been thinking a lot about how to disseminate what it is that enlightened teachers do. A promising way is through peer observation, with the observer as learner.  With so few enlightened teachers in place, around 5% of all teachers, then the logical next step is to take short video clips of them in action so that the observations can be done asynchronously and, ideally, in facilitated small groups.

We have a good basis for an observation protocol, which can be refined over time.