How to build legitimate teacherly authority - 4!
I have talked about Active Open-Mindedness (AOM) in a previous blog.
AOM is the fourth and last of the capacities that underpin Life Skills, the Competencies and Character Qualities which along with Foundational Literacies, make up twenty-first century skills. AOM underpins critical thinking and contributes to problem solving, both critical capabilities in the modern world.
Formal reasoning begins to appear around ten to twelve years old as interior senses mature making memory more reliable, also affording the delaying of gratification and the capacity to anticipate consequences.
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How to build legitimate teacherly authority - 3!
I touched on caring as the basis for building teacherly authority here.
From the age of somewhere between four and six, a young child, begins to experience the emergence of a second-person perspective and its concepts of reciprocity and fairness: “If I hurt you, you can hurt me back” and “one for you and one for me”. The child begins to learn the rules for having friends, and foundational to this, she needs to learn to care for another.
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How to build legitimate teacherly authority - 2!
Following from last week’s post, this week I want to look at the capacity to get things done, again I have touched on this subject in a previous post here.
From the age of about 18 months intrepid toddlers begin the process of learning how to get what they want and to get things done. Aside from an intuitive capacity for manipulation through various categories to get what they want – physical (grabbing what they want), intellectual (being tricky), emotional (tantrums) and social (calling on others to intervene) – an increasing ability to act in the world follows the stages of empowerment.
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How to build legitimate teacherly authority - 1!
The expression of twenty-first century skills propounded by the World Economic Forum splits these skills into Foundational Literacies (that can be written in the curriculum) and then Competencies and Character Qualities that, together, I like to refer to as Life Skills.
At first glance, it looks daunting to try and develop these Life Skills in students, but it becomes easier when you realise that these skills are derived from four capacities, three of which emerge in humans before the age of about six and the fourth is a particular cognitive stance essential to adult maturity and discernment.
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