The best piece of feedback Cameron Paterson ever received came from his Year 9 students. When asked what advice they would give teachers, two responses stopped him: “Don’t always do what you want” and “Let them grow into themselves instead of making them be something else.” He describes feeling proud of his students and stung by them simultaneously — and then spending the rest of his career acting on what they told him.
This chapter, from an Australian collection on cultivating thinking cultures in schools, is a practitioner’s account of what happens when a teacher genuinely relinquishes control. Paterson argues that the traditional teacher-centred classroom — where the teacher asks most of the questions, holds most of the answers, and does most of the thinking — is not just pedagogically limiting, it is relationally corrosive. Students who sense that their job is to guess what’s in the teacher’s head do not become curious learners. They become compliance performers. His antidote is a classroom built on visible thinking, navigated confusion, deep relational connection, and the deliberate transfer of agency to students.
One of the chapter’s most useful observations is also its most counterintuitive: many of the tasks teachers describe as workload burdens are actually missed learning opportunities. Assessment design, discussion facilitation, curriculum feedback, setting classroom norms — these are things students are entirely capable of co-constructing, and doing so makes learning more meaningful for them while reducing the load on the teacher. The most successful learning environments, Paterson argues, are those where leadership is genuinely shared between teacher and student.
For anyone thinking about why young people disengage in the middle years, this chapter offers a practitioner’s answer: when students are not known, not trusted, and not invited to contribute, school becomes something that is done to them. The shift Paterson describes is not a loss of teaching authority — it is the discovery that real authority comes from relationship, not control.