What’s in a name!

Naming the new, emerging paradigm will clear up confusion

The Behaviourist paradigm is based on the use of reward and punishment to shape behaviour and gain attention and relies on the pain-pleasure principle which many living creatures, including all primates and humans, respond to.

The teacherly authority principle is species-specific to homo sapiens and affords willing collaboration around shared attention and self-regulated behaviour.  I have been referring to this paradigm by capitalising Teacherly Authority.

This latter is confusing, so I am looking for a new name which captures the essence of the social dynamic based on the teacherly authority principle in as resonant a way as Behaviourism does for the pain-pleasure principle.

Watch this space as there are several promising candidates for this new name.

There are still places on the upcoming one-day Teacherly Authority program in Melbourne.  This is the ideal program for one or two of your great teachers to make a further step forward in their ability to fully engage all their students.

Learn about Teacherly Authority at a one-day program (Re)Building Teacherly Authority on 27th October (Melbourne) and 10th November (Sydney).  For more information and to register for either event, go here.  To get a fuller overview of Teacherly Authority, go here.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation.  At the core of this work is the concept and practice of teacherly authority.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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