Why We Teach: Preparing Young People For A Future That's Here

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by John Corrigan. John is a Melbourne-based author and consultant who helps schools operate to their full human potential. He's the author of six books, including Why We Teach,

[00:31] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:35] SPEAKER_01:

John Corrigan, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:37] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin. Thank you for having me today.

[00:39] SPEAKER_01:

So, John, in your new book, Why We Teach, you make the case that things need to change in education because we've for too long been overlooking some of the innate drives that all humans, including students, including teachers, have. What are some of those drives and how did that shape authorship of Why We Teach?

[01:02] SPEAKER_00:

It's probably worth going back quite a few years. When I first became interested in education nearly 20 years ago, one of the very first things I did was to interview a teacher in a local school. I interviewed a number of teachers, but this teacher stood out. And subsequently, she's what I call in the book, an enlightened teacher. And I had about a two hour conversation with her. And one of the things she said has stuck with me ever since.

[01:30]

And she said, in my 30 years of teaching, I've never had a discipline problem. Yet, she said, in this school, there are two or three teachers whose sole objective on entering the classroom is to survive to the end of the lesson. And at the end of that conversation, I thought, what is she doing that makes her so successful? And just as importantly, why aren't the others doing it as well? And it's taken a long, long time to be able to answer adequately those two questions. But this idea that we have more than an innate drive for competence has really been key to answering those two questions.

[02:14]

Our innate drive for competence is the desire to develop knowledge and skills to be effective in the world. And we can see this in children, you know, a two-year-old, a three-year-old. piling bricks one on top of the other, they fall over, they keep piling again. They're striving to become competent. So we know about that drive and our schools are largely built around that and they do that very well. But the second drive we have is a drive for autonomy.

[02:48]

And autonomy is this capacity for thinking and acting for ourselves, for using our time and energy in ways that are meaningful to us. And this is an innate drive. So if we don't suppress it, it will develop within children. But historically within education, we've used controlled motivation, we've used reward and punishment which has tended to suppress the development of this innate drive of autonomy within children. So the third drive coming out of self-determination theory is a driver psychological connection. And this is more complex.

[03:36]

And so we'll have to unpack it with a little more care as we progress. But essentially this is connection with other people, it's connection with ourselves, it's connection with our world, and it's a connection to meaning. So it's a more complex drive, but we have this drive to connect, to have meaningful connections, to feel at ease in the world, to feel that we're in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. And in fact, when we, as you're probably aware, when we have that feeling, we have a sense of joy. So our organism responds with joy when we are in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. So that's probably a good way of describing that third innate drive.

[04:27]

Yeah.

[04:28] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I love that starting point of self-determination theory and going back to some of that research from decades ago on competence, autonomy, and as you said, connection. And I know different authors have different ways of framing those. But in schools, we tend, as you say, to focus only on the first of those, only on... building students' knowledge and skill, their competence, often at the expense of, say, their autonomy.

[04:56]

Do we need to choose between them? Can we do a good job of emphasizing all three in schools?

[05:03] SPEAKER_00:

The core of the book argues that, in fact, we can. Not only can we, but we need to be able to, to prepare children for the world that they're living in now and the future that's arriving. Well, the suppression of autonomy, as I detail in the book, has had really pernicious and long-term effects. So I unpack a case study in the book around... Well, the case study was research done by two researchers in New South Wales and Australia, Collie and Martin, who looked at the motivation of teachers

[05:48]

And essentially, they show that around about 60% of teachers are disengaged from their work. They don't enjoy their work. They don't find their work to be meaningful. And then about 40% of teachers find their work to be meaningful. And obviously there's a range within that 40%. The top end of that range, teachers who have a really high sense of self-efficacy.

[06:16]

They really value what they're doing. They have a strong drive towards mastery to get better at what they're doing. They're not at all uncertain about what they need to do. They're not anxious. They don't avoid doing stuff that they need to do. These are people who are gaining great meaning from their work.

[06:34]

So these proportions, sort of 60%, 40%, are replicated by research done in the US. And in fact, they're replicated by research done in a whole range of different industries and different countries. So the way I'm framing this is to say, if you take sort of a normal distribution of young people, put them through a traditional schooling system, then you're going to end up with 60% of those people later in life doing work which they don't enjoy, which they're not engaged in, which they don't find meaningful, and they don't have the capacity to think and act in a way to change that situation. I think it'd be true for you, Justin, as it's true for me. If I find myself in a position that I'm not enjoying, it's not meaningful, I do something about it.

[07:29]

So for one reason or another, my capacity for autonomy has developed over time.

[07:37]

But for 60% of people, they don't have that capacity. So they just continue doing something which they're not enjoying, they're not engaged with, they're not finding meaningful. So if we continue doing this, we continue creating that 60% of people. And that's not good for the individual, clearly. It's not good for society. And we need to break that.

[08:07]

We need to break that nexus.

[08:09] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And you said that's true for both the teachers who are currently working in schools, as well as the broader population. The students, when they go out into the adult world, we see a similar proportion of 60% of people not being engaged, not being fulfilled in what they're doing.

[08:27] SPEAKER_00:

Exactly right. Yes. And unless we do something about it, unless we break that nexus, then it'll just continue that way.

[08:34] SPEAKER_01:

One thing, John, that I appreciate about your work as I've explored your website and your book is that you have an intense focus on what you call nexus problems. And for anyone who's not familiar with that word, what do you mean by a nexus problem?

[08:49] SPEAKER_00:

I would consider myself to be a seeker of hidden value. So within the education sector, I look for problems, right? And the problem is not necessarily something where somebody puts their hand up and says, I've got a problem. It's more a situation where people feel frustrated or ill at ease, or they sort of know things could be different. And what I can do is I can identify such a situation and then reframe it as a problem. And then once something is a problem, you can find a solution to it so I can find a problem, find a solution, and then go to a school, to principals and say, do you realize that in this area of what you do, if we frame it this way, we can do this.

[09:42]

And that makes life richer, better for everybody concerned. So in a sense, that's the core of what I do is I look for problems. But a nexus problem is a problem which, if solved, solves a whole bunch of other problems at the same time. And really what I'm looking for is that nexus problem. And I think in this book, what I've found is a nexus problem and that if the profession of teaching does indeed support competence, autonomy,

[10:19] SPEAKER_01:

these forms of connection that we've talked about then a whole bunch of problems get resolved right it's kind of the the one thread we can pull that will unravel some some related and thorny problems that's a lovely way of putting it yes john my sense having been an elementary principal as well as having been a middle school teacher and doing my student teaching at the high school level is that a lot of these problems of you know of a lack of autonomy and connection seem to be less pronounced in the younger grades, but then become more pronounced as students get older, and especially as they near the end of high school and approach adulthood. Do you see that in your work? And if so, why do you think that's the case?

[10:58] SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I think that absolutely is the case. And it partly touches on the third innate drive, which is to do with how children engage with the world. And so a child... you know, at seven or eight years old, he's much readier to accept the influences that external to them.

[11:21]

But as they, as they grow and their need for autonomy increases, then that autonomy has to be suppressed to a greater extent. So there's a bigger gap between the child's need and what they're getting as they go progressively through school. And we see this in other areas as well. So Ken Robinson often talked about curiosity being high in young children, but almost disappeared by the time it got to 18.

[11:50] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And we should say we're recording this shortly after Sir Ken's passing. And of course, many educators, many millions and millions of educators have seen Sir Ken's TED Talk. And I believe both he and you were educated in the UK. Is that correct?

[12:04] SPEAKER_00:

That's correct, yes.

[12:06] SPEAKER_01:

So you said something just a moment ago that I think is really important, that as young people's desire for autonomy naturally develops as they approach adulthood, we do something in school that directly attempts to counteract that. What is it that we do that attempts to fight that autonomy, and why do you think we do that?

[12:25] SPEAKER_00:

I think the reason we do it is relatively straightforward. If you think our schooling systems were set up post the Second World War in an environment where where most work was based around reward and punishment. Most work was algorithmic in nature. That is work that could be set out sequentially in steps. And to get people to do that work effectively, you offer rewards and punishments. So it was quite natural for reward and punishment to be applied within schools.

[12:59]

And as Edward Dessy of the self-determination theory showed back in the 70s that reward and punishment kills self-motivation, kills autonomy. So it was relatively, it was natural for this to take place.

[13:18] SPEAKER_01:

And I think that puts upon us a mandate to really rethink and redesign many of those systems that are not built with student autonomy in mind as a legitimate condition of learning. So in your work, I know you share my affinity for many of the same thinkers and some of the same principles about how we can redesign some of that work. How are schools effectively building in autonomy and yet still keeping in mind the need to get all students across what in some respects is still a common finish line, right? We want that personalization. We want that autonomy. But at the same time, we don't want high school to be entirely choose your own adventure.

[14:02]

So what are effective organizations doing to build in that autonomy that students so desperately need?

[14:08] SPEAKER_00:

So I'd respond to that in three ways. So if we go back to this teacher that really started my journey, this is a teacher in the book I now call an enlightened teacher. And so these types of teachers, and they're about 5% of all teachers, and that number seems to be relatively homogeneous. And these are the teachers that we remember our whole lives. And we remember them because they have a genuine impact on who we become as people. So these teachers have a relationship with their students, which is so valued by their students that their students will go out of their way not to disrupt the relationship.

[14:52]

Now, this isn't an unhealthy response of the child. The child is getting from the teacher things which are meeting their innate needs, and they want that to continue. Hence, this teacher saying they've never had a discipline problem because children do not want to disrupt the class because they want this relationship to continue. Similarly, children will willingly do their best work if such teachers propose the work to their students. So these 5% of teachers who've been with us always show that you can have minimal discipline problems, and get children to willingly do their best work by the nature of the relationship that takes place.

[15:44]

And one of the things that always puzzled me was that if these teachers were football players, for example, that every young football player would aspire to be like them. But in the education sector, we know these teachers exist. Most successful adults have experienced one or two such teachers during their own schooling. Yet your young teacher does not try to emulate them typically. And for me, the reason for that is that those teachers themselves have not been able to explain what it is that they do that makes them so effective. and people observing them from outside can't say, well, what is it they're doing that makes them effective?

[16:32]

And I think with this book and using self-determination theory, I've been able to create that framework that says, yeah, we know what these people do. We know that what they do is learnable skills. And a question I always ask principals is, you've got statistically 5% of your teachers are like this. What if 25% of your teachers were like that? What would be the effect? And without exception, principals say it would transform our schools for the better.

[17:06] SPEAKER_01:

So hearing that statistic of 5%, I think probably most of us would agree that along the way, we had one or two teachers who would fit that description, who really made the learning come alive, who didn't take that sense of autonomy away from us and really motivated us to pursue with great interest whatever the subject was. And it's especially clear that you have a teacher like that if it's a subject that you were not very interested in. If you've ever had a math teacher like that and you were not previously interested in math, being able to see a subject come alive because of that relationship and wanting to go along with the teacher's excitement for their own subject, I think has carried many of us through subjects that otherwise we would not have pursued with the same enthusiasm. But I have to be honest, John, that 5% figure is a little bit depressing, right?

[18:00]

That is not a majority figure. by a long shot and not enough to get us to where we need to be as a society or as a school. And I've seen, you know, some attempts to maybe, you know, capture and bottle the magic that maybe a small percentage of teachers have. But what do we do to make this kind of teaching and this kind of relationship a reality for more of our students, because we certainly can't increase the class size of those 5% so that they serve many more students. How do we make this more a reality across a larger percentage of the teaching population?

[18:35] SPEAKER_00:

So in the book, I talk about a teacher taxonomy. I say, yes, about 60% of teachers are what I call competent teachers. So these are teachers who focus on supporting competence, So they manage a class and they transfer knowledge to the children. And so they're competent in that sense. And they're also competent in the sense that they're doing what the system wants them to do. These are the 60% who don't really enjoy what they're doing.

[19:02]

They're not particularly engaged in what they're doing. It's not especially meaningful to them. And we've spoken about those. And then the other end is the 5% who really we're aspiring towards. But between those two groups, there's about 35% of teachers who, in the book, I call motivated teachers. And these are teachers whose rallying cry is, it's all about relationships, relationships, relationships.

[19:28]

And these teachers do build meaningful relationships with their students. They do allow the development of autonomy. And that group... is large enough since we've got 40% who are supporting things beyond competence.

[19:49]

And that really is a group with some critical mass now. And John Hattie would say that collective teacher efficacy has the highest impact on student learning of any activity that teachers can engage in over which they have some control. So it's got an impact of 1.57 on his scale. And so with those 40%, we actually have a large enough group that that group, if they accept that part of their responsibility as a teacher is to do this, is to lead the other 60% into the belief that if we all have meaningful relationships with our students, then this would be more valuable for the teacher, it would be more valuable for the child, we would develop greater

[20:42]

autonomy, we would get greater outcomes. So in a sense, this is a nexus problem that can be resolved. It's shifting the 60% of competent teachers to have the practices of the motivated teachers, and then to shift the motivated teachers to have the practices of these enlightened teachers. And obviously, none of this is going to happen overnight. But there is now a reliable and stable pathway to move from where we are to having a greater number of these teachers we aspire to becoming.

[21:13] SPEAKER_01:

So as leaders, we can recognize maybe that small percentage of teachers who are approaching this in the right way and get more of what we're looking for from the rest by emphasizing the right things. Well, let's talk about that some more. You have a concept in the book, and I know you have an entire previous book on this topic. called the red brain, blue brain paradigm. Take us into that a little bit and explain what the red brain means and how that's relevant to this work.

[21:40] SPEAKER_00:

So when we are subjected to control motivation, to reward and punishment as children, then it, around the childhood mind, we create a sort of a scaffolding of shoulds and mustn'ts and all sorts of rules about how we must behave that are imposed onto us from the external world. and for a variety of reasons that won't go into now, that that scaffolding can persist into adulthood. So our adult mind develops from about the age of 10 onwards. But in parallel, we retain this whole series of rules and memories and constructs about how we should behave. And so split this into all of that scaffolding or things associated with it as the red brain.

[22:33]

And then the blue brain is the adult mind. And so when the adult mind, the blue brain is fully in control, we're confident, we're collaborative, we're creative, we are at our best. But when the red brain is triggered, in a sense, we revert to the resources that we had access to when we were below 10 years of age. And we lose many of our capacities. We lose our capacity for choice. We respond impulsively to things.

[23:02]

Emotions tend to overwhelm us. So road rage is an extreme example of red brain triggering, where we simply lose control completely and we are anger. Anger takes over completely. So in a sense, we can say that the 60%, 40% split really comes about from we create children with red brain, blue brain, and the proportion that they have, that is how often the red brain triggers, how easy it is for them to get back to the blue brain, ultimately determines where they fit within that 60% and 40%.

[23:43] SPEAKER_01:

And I think it's important to note that those are not evenly distributed, right? If we think about where those perhaps 5% of teachers are or where that percentage of students are, it's not random. And if you have worked in a school that overwhelmingly has disengaged teachers or one that has a very high percentage of what you call enlightened teachers, it's quite obvious at the level of the culture of the school, isn't it?

[24:11] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely, it is. Yes, it is. In fact, when I've interviewed enlightened teachers and asked them, well, how come you do what you do? There have typically been four reasons. And one is a particular family background. So they were brought up in a family that actually met their needs fully.

[24:30]

And so they just turned into a blue brain adult to all intents and purposes. Or a second reason is that they wanted to emulate a teacher they had. So they had an enlightened teacher and they said, I want to be like that. So they, you know, they strived as much as they could to be like that teacher. Interestingly, another reason is not wanting to be, to emulate another teacher. That is, they had a teacher that was appalling and they thought, I do not want to be like that teacher at all.

[25:02]

And the fourth is that a mentor early on said, well, why don't you do it this way as opposed to doing it this way? So in every case, these enlightened teachers have developed despite the system, not because of the system.

[25:17] SPEAKER_01:

I want to make sure we talk about what we as system leaders can do to change that. But if I could, I wanted to read a little quote from your book toward the end of chapter 11. You say, the main change in the journey from motivated to enlightened teacher is the shift from responding to people with focused attention to responding with sustained attention. Rather than approaching a student or colleague as a familiar problem to be solved or as a task to be completed, An enlightened teacher treats them as people to whom they are in service. Thus, the teacher is open to the new or unfamiliar. And in this capacity, they respond with kindness and compassion, whatever the other says or does.

[25:55]

The effect is that students go out of their way not to disappoint or let down the teacher and willingly do their best. There are no discipline issues, above average outcomes, self-motivated students, and the complete absence of controlled motivation. And you say that a precondition of that is that the teacher has already brought their red brain largely under control and can kind of model that for students. So how do we get more of that? What are some things that we can do as school leaders and as a profession to turn more motivated teachers into enlightened teachers?

[26:31] SPEAKER_00:

Yes, and in a sense, that's the core message of the book. Clearly, historically, most effort in teaching development within schools goes into curriculum. Over the last few decades, more of that's gone into pedagogy. And what I would argue is that there is a third leg to this triad, and that is behavior, so adult behavior. So if we were to put curriculum, pedagogy, and behavior on the same level, so to speak, then attention and resources would go into behavior. So for an individual teacher to say, yes, I need to be, I need to understand and be able to deliver the curriculum.

[27:14]

I need to have the range of pedagogies that allow that to take place effectively. But I also need to work on my own behavior. I need to get my red brain under control and out of the way. And the chapter in the book, I title first do no harm, which is this sense of of removing these unwarranted influences on children. And they really come from four areas. One is fixed beliefs, fixed beliefs around students, around what it means to be a teacher, how the world works.

[27:55]

One is to do with triggering. That is, there is something, a child has a particular tone of voice or particular mannerism that triggers that triggers my red brain, that causes some memories to come up from my past, which have negative connotations, and those memories can cascade. So I get this negative feeling and I respond defensively to the child, or I decide I don't like the child because I have these negative feelings whenever I'm with them. So to remove all of those, to extinguish those triggers, remove them out of the way. And then the things like moodiness and general overwhelm. So as a professional, to work on those things and remove them is the first step to move from the competent teacher to the motivated.

[28:47]

Because as we've said, the innate drives are innate. If we don't suppress them, they will develop. So if we don't respond in these ways that limit child, then their autonomy will be developed. So that's the shift from competent to motivated. But once that is under control, once we have this self-management, that we can be in the presence of colleagues or students and respond with equanimity to whatever is occurring, then the next step is to make this shift in the nature of the relationship, which characterizes the enlightened teacher. And this is where it gets quite tricky because one of the things that adults say about enlightened teachers is, this teacher saw in me something that nobody else saw.

[29:45]

And that's a really quite consistent response that adults have got. And in a sense, what's occurring is the adult has such a relationship with the child that the space between the child and the adult allows for new possibilities and new potentialities to emerge. And these possibilities and potentialities allow the child to become better fitted to the world, that is more at ease with the world, more sense of I'm in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. And as we said right at the beginning, that when we have that sense, we get a sense of joy. And so when the child is having those experiences with the enlightened teacher, this is why they want them to continue.

[30:41]

Now, for the enlightened teacher to do that, it is, as you say from that quote, to shift from the use of focused attention to the use of sustained attention. Okay, so we have two ways of paying attention to the world and these correlate with most creatures. One is we need to exploit the world that is close to us for food, for example, and we need to be aware on a sort of a global level of threats that might be emerging and making us the dinner rather than us looking for the dinner. So these two forms of paying attention can be boil down into focused attention. And focused attention is where we are looking for things that are familiar to us, that we've seen before.

[31:35]

And to be able to know that we've seen something before, we need to, first of all, see it or hear it or touch it or taste it or whatever, and then compare it to things that we've seen, touched, tasted, heard before. So we need to make a call on memory. And so when our brain does that, it shuts down sensory input so it can use the brain's machinery to make this comparison of whether I've seen something before. So when we're using focused attention, we are literally focused. We're looking for things that we've seen before. And when we see something that we think we've seen before, we shut down our senses and we make this comparison in our minds.

[32:19]

And focused attention is really, a really really powerful way for us to be able to do work when we go into when we go into flow for example when we're working on working on something at our desks then we're using this form of form of attention very powerful but not very good for work for using with people because if we use focus attention with a person then intermittently we are not paying attention to the person. The other person goes, well, this person's not really paying attention to me. So, well, why should I pay attention to them? So relationships based on focused attention tend to be more transactional.

[33:06]

Now, sustained attention is this more global form of attention where we're looking for what is different or what is new and To do that, we have to have our attention on all of the time. We have to allow everything in so we don't make any call on memory. So when we use sustained attention with somebody, the other person goes, wow, this person's really listening to me. They must really care about me. And therefore, I should be considerate. I should be thoughtful about how I respond to them.

[33:46]

And sustained attention is typically what's used in coaching. It's what makes coaching very effective. It essentially lifts the other person up into the blue brain, into their best mind state, and then allows them to investigate issues or problems or challenges in a way where they have all of their faculties available to them. And coaching has become quite ubiquitous in organizations and in education. for exactly this reason. And so essentially what the enlightened teacher is doing is using that form of attention with a child in such a way that it is allowing these possibilities and potentialities to emerge for the child and for them to have this better fittedness, this greater sense of ease and this incipient sense of joy.

[34:41] SPEAKER_01:

Such a good description. And it strikes me that it's not really possible for an organization to skip that type of relationship between a superintendent and maybe an area director, a director and a principal, a principal and a teacher, a teacher and a student. I mean, it really has to be modeled and practiced at all levels, doesn't it?

[35:02] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely it does, yes. And in fact, we know this works. The principal of a school who behaves in this way will have a school that works better than a school next door. And when that principal leaves, they retire or whatever, and a principal with a different way of relating to people comes in, the performance of that school can deteriorate quite rapidly. We know this takes place.

[35:24] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Why We Teach, Preparing Young People for a Future That's Here. Well, John, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[35:33] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin.

[35:35] SPEAKER_01:

It's been a pleasure.

[35:36] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.