Towards the authoritative teacher: reasons and modalities

Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on some practices that can help teachers enable every student to reach his or her full potential. After a review of some possible reasons why some students behave in a non-edifying way, an exposition of the reasons why teachers should prefer an authoritative educational style to an authoritarian, permissive, and even democratic one and a definition of loving teacher follow. The paper also contains a consideration of the rational persuasion technique, the learning environment, the figure of the research student, and the reward and punishment system, which should, ideally, be replaced with a consequences system. In this paper, numerous suggestions from neuroscience have also been added. In particular, we discuss the care teachers should reserve for the students’ amygdala, since it plays an important role in students’ emotions. Inadequate consideration of this aspect of students’ physiology could lead students to refuse to learn with a particular teacher. The issue of the peculiarity of the adolescent brain is also addressed. This is even valid if, as in the case of the writer, one is dealing with university students, because, biologically speaking, their brains, even at their age, are not yet mature.