The swing from Behaviourism to Teacherly Authority is a shift in paradigm as profound as the Copernican revolution in cosmology: the move from a geocentric – earth at the centre - to the heliocentric – sun at the centre - view of our solar system.

Behaviourism controls through putting our animal nature at the centre of things, obscuring many of the better aspects of our humanity. Teacherly Authority empowers by putting our human nature at the centre, allowing these better aspects to flourish.

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In a recent program a teacher, C – who has reached the enlightened stage – described a recent experience of walking into a year 7 class for his next lesson just as the previous teacher was finishing up. He recounted that as soon as he walked into the classroom students who were in the wrong seats jumped up and moved to their correct places, others adjusted their uniforms to the prescribed standard, all readied themselves for his lesson.

The outgoing teacher suddenly burst out angrily “why do you do this (be orderly, be respectful) for him and not for me?” and walked out of the class.

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The feedback from last week’s participants in the (Re)Building Teacherly Authority program has been excellent and sharing the materials has opened my eyes even further to the epochal nature of the change that is occurring.

Finally, we can dispense with behaviourist approaches to relationships using reward and punishment to shape behaviour.  These approaches produce the red brain during childhood which most adults spend the rest of the lives trying to overcome,

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In his 1990 paper* ‘Reforming Again, Again, and Again’, Larry Cuban laments the fact that the same attempts at educational reform keep being repeated and especially such reforms have swung between teacher-centred approaches to student-centred approaches and back. This history suggests we need to emphasise one pole or the other and we cannot have both at the same time.

But we can.

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