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Once a teacher is invested and helping children to get “unstuck”, then the learning teacher takes in all that they experience with striving to be fully invested and with helping children to get unstuck and uses these experiences to change their world view.  This requires the capacity for active open-mindedness, to be reflective and ground their world view in the reality of their students.

Thus, they broaden the appreciation and compassion they have for their students, and they increase their skill in helping students to re-frame their misperceptions and misconceptions, to change their faulty ways of thinking

Once a teacher is fully invested, as described last week, she can begin to recognise that children are ‘stuck’ in many ways. ‘Stuck’ here means that the child has a perception – of their work, themselves, the world they are in – which is poorly formed or incorrect.  This misperception makes them feel threatened, ill at ease and unsafe.

Some examples might be, that they are unable to do their classwork and believe that they are just not good enough, the belief that adults are not to be trusted

The invested teacher is the teacher who looks at a child and sees the child, unfiltered by any hang ups or triggers that the teacher may have acquired as they have grown up.  This means not taking a dislike to a child, not being resentful of a child, because they have a more privileged life than we had, for example, or because they have a particular skill or talent which we wished we had.  It means not being dismissive of a child because they do not know how to behave properly, or they cannot grasp simple ideas, or how they dress, or how they hold themselves.

The invested teacher is not resentful, jealous, indifferent, dismissive, superior nor inferior, not boastful, malicious, nor easily provoked.

I have often written about the professionalising of the teaching profession and the difference between a profession and a non-profession being that the professional is part of the offer. We know that a doctor’s bedside manner makes a difference to a patient’s recovery as well as a sound diagnosis and treatment.

Thus, as teachers become increasingly professional (as opposed to being state employees) who they are and how they relate to their students increasingly matters.  Many teachers recognise this with the slogan “it is all about relationships”.

In our latest research, we started from the observation that a small minority of teachers have all their students willingly doing their best work and self-regulating to avoid any disruptions.

We identified this phenomenon with the ‘teacherly authority’ principle whereby a ‘student’ agrees to pay full attention to their ‘teacher’ and wherever their teacher directs their attention when the ‘teacher’ has a capacity, which they want to provide in the best interest of the ‘student’, and which the student values highly.