The Importance of ‘SELF’

Abstract

The industry of education is often discussed in relation to the technical-rational toolkits that are used to drive student learning and schooling outcomes. Modelling has emerged over the past 20 years as a core driver in problematising and seeking solutions to the many challenges that emerge across schools, but this in itself has only been part of the story. The other element to schools is that they are in fact social institutions that (by their very nature) require strong social and emotional foundations to enable the transmission and flow of quality learning to occur. Moreover, the social complexity that exists deep within the organisational fabric of schools requires teachers to develop strong interpersonal behaviours that enable them to build effective working partnerships with their peers, students and families. At the core of such abilities is ‘knowing the self’, given that the inner, private world of the individual is the point from which the external world is interacted. In this regard meta-awareness and meta-cognition emerge as the driving psycho-social planks that determine the capacity of teachers to survive not only the turbulence and pressures that the industry presents, but equally in their ability to participate successfully in social actions with others and to liberate children’s capacities to produce high quality learning outcomes.