Teacherly authority in action!
I first became interested in enlightened teachers in 2001. It took several years to understand enough of what they were doing differently to develop a cognitive coaching methodology which emulated their capacity for listening and always responding with compassion and in the best interest of their students.
I did not realise at the time, but coaching is a good example of teacherly authority: the coach has a capacity that they want to teach in the best interest of the coachee, the coachee values the capacity and agrees to pay attention.
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Let’s accelerate!
Once deeply within the teacherly authority paradigm the idea of punishing someone becomes unthinkable, literally the thought of doing such a thing never arises. The idea of blaming someone or judging them also don’t arise. Of course, this does not mean there are no consequences for unacceptable behaviours, but these consequences don’t diminish the person receiving them and don’t generate strong emotions in the person implementing them.
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Good ideas!
People are innately worthy of respect within the framework of Teacherly Authority, but ideas are not, ideas must earn respect. Put another way, some ideas are better than others and the best ideas help us all to flourish. To find the good ideas and weed out the poor ones we need to use the full range of cognitive skills available to us and modern curricula and pedagogies provide an appropriate focus on developing these skills.
However, under Behaviourist practices there is a strong tendency to integrate ideas into our own identity.
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Far-reaching impact!
Many professions are organised so that the most senior staff are still practising their profession even whilst being in senior leadership positions. Rather than having a single principal or partner, professions often have a group of partners, individually and collectively accountable for the success of their organisation.
Recently, I was speaking with an enlightened teacher, and he said he would love to be a principal - and thinks he has the capability to get there – but loves too much being with students in the classroom.
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