To ensure students acquire twenty-first century skills and the subject knowledge and procedural skills to become effective adults, teachers need to be effective teachers of their subject areas and have appropriate levels of ‘teacherly authority’.

Schools habitually focus on developing curriculum and effective pedagogies so helping staff further acquire and grow their ‘teacherly authority’ comes down to the senior leaders of the school modelling this. Obviously, these leaders would model that being a teacher means being fully engaged and continually learning new skills. Being passionate and committed to one’s profession is a given.

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‘Teacherly authority’ (explored in detail by Zak Stein*) is a powerful concept, unique to humans, which affords cultural transmission.

The basic mechanism is asymmetric, one person (the teacher) has a greater capacity than the other (the student) which is recognised by the student and who thereby accepts to pay attention to what the teacher is paying attention to. The student may pay attention through coercion (a model which was dominant in schools in the past but is much less effective today) or because they value what there is to be learnt.

That is the basic premise. What is sometimes missed is that teacherly authority affords cultural transmission and not simply transmission of subject knowledge/skills.

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Here is a quote from Margaret Mead* which perfectly addresses the issues facing education today:

“Now, with our greater understanding of the process, we must cultivate the most flexible and complex part of the system—the behavior of adults. We must, in fact, teach ourselves how to alter adult behavior so that we can give up postfigurative upbringing, with its tolerated cofigurative components, and discover prefigurative ways of teaching and learning that will keep the future open. We must create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn, not what they should be committed to but the value of commitment.”

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There is a saying that “primary teachers teach children, but secondary teachers teach subjects”. In the light of the thread I have been following in the last three posts (here, here and here) I think we might want to modify this to “primary teachers teach children, and secondary teachers teach children how to become adults”.

Just as when a baby enters the world, they need to be cradled by caring parents so that they feel safe to start their life journey, young people stepping into a new world where the content of thought is now abstract, need also to be cradled by caring adults.

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