Returning to health!
In my book Red Brain Blue Brain, I describe how the ‘red brain’ is created by our being subjected to reward and punishment as we go through childhood and our childhood mind, rather than simply fading away as the adult mind emerges, persists into adulthood hedged around with all sorts of triggers and automatic responses. When the ‘red brain’ triggers we only have access to what the childhood mind had access to – we become self-focused, usually anxious or fearful and prone to rumination.
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Learning to focus!
Learning to focus (on a task, on an activity, on instructions, etc.) is an important step in a young child’s development and preparation for their formal learning journey. Under the Behaviourist paradigm, young children learn to focus by the straight application of reward and punishment.
As this paradigm has weakened, we see increasing numbers of children growing up with a limited capacity to focus.
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What’s in a name!
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.
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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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