A teacher asks a principal: “Do you think I’m a good teacher?”
“Of course,” replies the principal.
“What makes you think that?” asks the teacher.
“Well, I can tell from being around you that you really care about your students and their success.”
This is the basic conversation that occurs everywhere. Where students succeed, credit is given to the student and the teacher. Where a student fails, the responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of the student. They haven’t taken responsibility for their learning, they haven’t tried hard enough, they haven’t been paying attention, they haven’t made good choices, they haven’t chosen the right crowd to hang out with, even. Or, blame can be placed on the so-called “digital age”; computers distract students from learning, TV distracts students from reading, texting distracts students from actual human interaction. But recent studies are showing that the single most important factor in student success or failure is having a good teacher. How do we tell the good teachers from the bad ones?
Students are judged almost continuously from the time they enter school in kindergarten until the time they graduate. Teachers are not. There are very few times in a teacher’s career that they will be judged on their performance using quantitative methods. (There are even fewer times when this judgment will have any significant impact on their career, which is another matter.) This is true because there are some widespread assumptions about what makes a good teacher, and because based on those faulty assumptions methods for evaluating teacher performance have been misguided.
Let’s face those assumptions.
Teachers are good if they care about their students. Teachers are sometimes cast in the role of care-giver, counselor, friend or surrogate parent. They oversee a child’s development, and many times have more face-to-face time with students than the actual parents. One would think that what makes a good care-giver is that they care, and this is probably true in many cases. On the other hand, teaching is not primarily about caring. If the role of the teacher is guide, however, care might play a role or it might not. If I am a camping guide, I can care in general about the value of human life and hence instruct my fellow campers in safety guidelines and techniques for camping success. I’ll be a very popular camping guide if I can do that and foster a sense of well-being and “fun” (for lack of a better word) in my group, as well. So certainly, care in general and for the individual is probably a part of what it means to be a good teacher. But teachers are like bartenders. They say that 90% of bartending is being a good listener, or being a conversationalist, or being wise, or whatever. If you think the barkeep cares about you, you are more likely to sit in front of them and let loose your alcohol-addled problems in their direction. You’re also more likely to tip, I would imagine. But the bartender doesn’t have to actually care about you, and in fact, their job could be replicated fairly well using a robot or a fancy vending machine. The experience of sitting at the bar would be lessened, but you would get just as drunk.
Take this to the extreme: robot teachers. Of course, as with many creepy extremes, you will find them in Japan. (Give me a break, it’s kind of true.) So, there’s a robot teacher, with no internal care mechanism: a zombie teacher, if you will. If you remove the humanoid characteristics of the zombie teacher, and realize that robots aren’t up to snuff when dealing with squealing elementary kids, what you have is a computer training course. Computer directed self-study. The computer prompts you to remember certain things or learn a concept. Then it asks you to practice using that concept in various situations. At the end, it assesses how well you can apply that concept. Ironically, you can get certified as a teacher using this very process through the American Board of Certification for Teacher Excellence. Care is not a necessary condition for good teaching, although it helps to motivate the teacher and can make a classroom a socially inviting place to be, which in turn could motivate students. On the other hand, you can learn by interacting with a computer program.
Summary: A teacher doesn’t have to care, but it’s probably better if they do.
Teachers are good if they work hard. This is obviously unsound reasoning. If a teacher is clueless, it’s a bit like they’re running on a treadmill: they can go as fast and as hard as they want, they won’t get anywhere. On other hand, for a teacher who “knows what they are doing” (this is the target concept, isn’t it?) then working hard is a good thing. We can reasonably assume that student learning will improve because of the teacher’s hard work. The appearance of “working hard” is also related to an individual’s abilities. Some people make it look easy. One person lifts the piano through a gargantuan effort, Arnold bends down and picks it up with his pinky toe. Effort is good, but misdirected or inefficient effort is useless. Simply working hard is not a necessary or sufficient condition for being a good teacher.
Summary: Working hard isn’t enough. You have to know what you’re doing, silly.
Teachers are good if they have education credentials. Well, George W. Bush graduated from Yale. On the other hand, part of the drama of the US presidency, or any world leadership position, is that there is no president training course. Will they succeed? Will they fail? It’s up in the air, and fun (or horrifying, as the case may be) to observe. I’m sure every teacher knows someone who has credentials up the wazoo but displays wild incompetence. The world is choc-full of idiots with fat resumes. Studies suggest that master’s degrees in education – that’s graduate school, people – do nothing to predict a teacher’s success as measured by typical standardized test scores. Majoring in your subject area – not in the teaching of your subject area – is a better predictor of success. So, content knowledge appears to be something solid we can point to.
Summary: Education degrees, ironically, don’t seem to do a good job of teaching people what they need to know to be a good teacher. Content is king.
Teachers are good if they have lots of experience. Paradoxically, this may not be the case. Most pay scales use years of teaching experience (along with strength of credentials, see #3) to determine salaries. But some studies have shown that new teachers can be more effective than very experienced teachers. This makes sense. A new teacher might be more focused on continual improvement, generally less set in their ways, more open to change and reform. An experienced teacher will have found the path of least resistance (there’s that working hard thing) and will gradually or suddenly lose the motivation to improve or maintain performance. Because teachers aren’t being evaluated in any meaningful way, an individual teacher will lose interest in improving. Decisions begin to be about how to avoid grief from administrators, parents and students, rather than how to improve student learning. If you are an experienced teacher, don’t fit the mold. Put yourself into the mindset of a fresh, newly minted teacher. How can you shake up your methods? How can you be more organized, better planned, more in touch with individual student needs? How can you be happier with your job? Teachers can’t necessarily rely on decades of experience to make them better. If you’ll forgive a shameless metaphor, a teacher is not a bottle of Bordeaux, but 40 bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau. You don’t keep the one costly bottle in the cellar only to open it decades later and taste vinegar. You open the fresh bottle every year. Seriously, you can’t go wrong with Beaujolais. (They know that in Japan, that’s for sure.)
Summary: Experience does not a good teacher make.
So, a good teacher is not necessarily the most caring, hard-working, well-credentialed, experienced person. But these are the best ways we currently have of deciding whether or not to hire a teacher, or to praise them, or whatever. Incidentally, you have to be a total blockhead or criminal to get fired from most teaching gigs, which probably attracts a certain set of people to the profession, aside from those of us who have a genuine interest in doing this job, and doing it well.
How do we figure out what a good teacher looks like? Do we just wait around until we spot one? Do we say that there are no good teachers and bad teachers, only good students and bad students? Do we go on deluding ourselves that we are all good teachers?
This Atlantic Monthly article has some illuminating tidbits concerning the positive answers to these questions. The WA is working on a piece about current research in the area of teacher effectiveness. Until then, comment on the assumptions above, add your own thoughts, and send in further assumptions that ought to be questioned.
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Bill and Melinda are looking into this. I guess we could just wait for their results.
http://www.denverpost.com/education/ci_13828944
Nice thoughts – I like article in the Guardian about the same thing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jan/19/teachers-francis-gilbert
It takes more than a good degree to be a good teacher – Francis Gilbert
David Cameron’s proclamation that the Tories will be “brazenly elitist” about the calibre of candidates entering the teaching profession betrays the fact that he doesn’t know anything about teaching. As a teacher in various comprehensives for the past 20 years, I have seen many good teachers, and some, it’s true, fit the stereotype that Cameron wants to impose: graduates with good degrees from so-called “good universities”. But I’ve also met a great many excellent teachers who wouldn’t have passed his test. Some didn’t have degrees in their chosen subjects; others didn’t have degrees at all.
Cameron’s cardinal mistake is to think qualifications make a good teacher. They don’t. When you’re faced with 30 truculent children after lunch on a Friday afternoon, qualifications don’t count for much. Take Lesley, a high-powered business executive who I mentored as she trained to be a teacher. She had everything: a great degree, excellent organisational skills and good communication skills. Yet she crumbled in the classroom because she was so impatient with her pupils: nothing they did was good enough. Whereas her employees had tolerated her endless nit-picking, her pupils became demotivated and disaffected.
David was another illustration of the shortcomings of Cameron’s policy: he had a first-class degree from Oxford and a penchant for oatmeal jackets and cravats. As his mentor, I observed him teach what I felt was a relatively well-behaved class of 12-year-olds. A quarter of an hour in, it was clear that none of the children had the slightest idea what he was talking about; the class began talking, then chucking his elaborate worksheets around the class. Ironically, it was his support teacher, who didn’t have a degree at all, who rescued the lesson by explaining in clear English what was required.
If you don’t have the right personality, you’ll suffer in the bearpit of today’s classrooms. In my experience, there are four types of teacher who are effective: the despot, the carer, the charmer, and the rebel. And none of them, in my experience, requires an upper-class degree.
I’ve come across many despotic teachers in my career. They are the Terminator or Lara Croft of teaching; the tough guy or gal who everyone turns to when the going gets really tough. They are nearly always very experienced teachers who know not only all the pupils but their parents, too, having taught many of them. During my first year of teaching, one of my classes rioted, pushed all the furniture out of my room, swore at me and blew cigarette smoke in my face. I called in the cigar-chomping despot of my school, the deputy head, and he blasted them away with a sound telling off.
Most manuals don’t advocate this approach to teaching, but I have to admit it can be very effective, even if morally dubious. Despotic teachers often extract fantastic work from their pupils, and rarely have to use their full armory – their reputations are usually enough. They are often highly organised, making their classrooms into small fortresses, and in my experience nearly always achieve above-average results, because they teach the syllabus to the last letter.
The opposite of the despot is the caring teacher. Without wanting to stereotype too much, many carers are women. They become surrogate parents for their pupils. Many don’t have degrees, and have been appointed as “mentors” or “support teachers” to help struggling pupils plan out their lives – working out ways in which they can do their work most effectively. Usually, pupils love seeing their mentors, and learn from them the vital skill of “taking responsibility for their own learning” (as it’s known in the jargon). I’ve taught some pupils who were really going off the rails – taking drugs, skipping school, getting into fights – yet when they were taken under the wing of one of these teachers, they transformed and blossomed.
Unlike the despot, the caring teacher works with lots of people: parents, other teachers, social workers. What she or he manages to do is make pupils see they can control and shape their own lives. The teacher might mother her charges to death in the process, but the end result is nearly always a happy pupil who has achieved very much against the odds.
The “charmer”, on the other hand, is quite different from both these previous staples of the teaching profession. They can be a disorganised species, living off adrenaline and wits. They are frequently highly academic, and are in teaching to be mates with their pupils, to understand them and play with them. With this sort of teacher, the classroom becomes one great big, bouncing playground of learning. Take Martin, one of the best teachers I’ve come across, who would prepare his lessons on the hoof after reading the newspaper, and would totally change direction mid-lesson if hit by some new inspiration. He was very disorganised, but did everything with a wink and a smile.
Finally, there’s the most controversial but often most effective kind of teacher: the rebel. These teachers see school as a place that should aim to transform society, and are equally loathed by Tories and New Labourites alike. They are also a dying breed.
Using thinkers such as Karl Marx and the Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire, they believe that our children have been brainwashed by our capitalistic society into making certain assumptions about inequality, exploitation, injustice. They see the classroom as the place where these children can be “deprogrammed” – and make amazing teachers because they are so passionate and persuasive. In the staffroom, they frequently rage against the system, pointing out that education isn’t about producing good little workers to prop up our iniquitous society. Even if you disagree with their politics, you have to admit they deliver blinding lessons, whatever their subject.
But the crucial point here is that none of these teachers learned their skills by getting a good degree: they learned them on the job. All could improve by watching other good teachers in the classroom and learning from their techniques. However, there are some “generic” traits which should be borne in mind when discussing what’s best for our schools.
Research shows that all the best teachers motivate their pupils to work hard, and assess them very regularly. Recently, I feel I’ve improved my teaching because I’ve learned more about assessing my pupils frequently; instead of concentrating upon my teaching, I’ve looked more closely at what my pupils are learning and tailored my lessons accordingly (I’ve had to be trained to do this).
There is now a great deal of research to suggest it is not your subject knowledge that’s the determining factor of how well your pupils achieve, but how you use your assessment of their achievements to plan and shape succeeding lessons. But I’m well aware that I still need further training in this area. At the moment, I am paying for that training myself in the form of a doctorate in education; there isn’t any hope of receiving funding from the government (believe me, I’ve tried). Luckily, my partner works so we can afford it, but most teachers struggling with families and high living costs cannot.
Instead of demoralising teachers with his ill-informed comments about what makes a good teacher, Cameron should commit himself to putting proper money and time into training the existing teachers in the system. Instead of paying for the training of a “brazen elite” of graduates, he should improve the wages of all teachers so that we are all treated like an “elite”. His current policy, if implemented, won’t improve the standards of teaching, and will instead further dishearten an already deflated profession.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Dear WA,
Summary: Education degrees, ironically, don’t seem to do a good job of teaching people what they need to know to be a good teacher. Content is king.
I agree whole heartedly with the first point. My ‘real degree’ as I like to call it seems oddly worse than the common-all-garden education degree when it comes to finding employment. There is a safety that the ed degree gives a employer – “they have a MA in education” will be the head’s defense to his board and director. It is sound bet, akin to betting on Payton Manning throwing a ball quite far. The content MA is too risky I think for many an employer. It gives them no justification of a basic level of teaching to present to their paymasters, the benefits may be obvious in terms of content knowledge, but hang on……aren’t we teaching under 18s? Is content really king?
I question your argument here – if you teach a higher level course to kids with heady academic expectations then perhaps, but, in the words of Fed-Ex, ‘delivery is king’. You show me a genius and I will show you a man/woman with a social disorder. Content is essential, far more essential than ‘curriculum mapping in the 22nd century by future planning’ or whatever turd is being packaged as the essence of teaching by the aforementioned geniuses over their KFC meal for one. But the ability to engage children in a natural way, to be able to spontaneously feed into their interests and make dull things fun is surely the benchmark for our trade.
WA, I can hear you now – ‘but content knowledge makes content more engaging’. I couldn’t agree more; I believe that educators that forego the ed MA in favour of improving their content are to be commended, but you need to be a engaging person to engage people successfully, and no MA in education or Phd in Gym Theory, will change that.
Ben, thanks for your thoughts. I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between genius and social ineptitude. Does a normal person’s sociability naturally curb tendencies to fixate on things to the extent that is required for “genius”? Anyway, point well taken about content. I agree that being a good teacher requires a certain kind of person, to put it generally, and that “the ability to engage children in a natural way” sounds fantastic. It’s definitely a piece of the puzzle, or so it would seem.
On the other hand, the “pied piper” theory may be just as debatable as the “content is king” theory. My least favorite teacher in college (my freshman year, so I was still a “child”) was perhaps the teacher from whom I learned the most. What a self-righteous bastard, my God, he was insufferable. But I could sit down and outline the entire course he taught. I can’t do that with most of my college courses, and I seem to remember really LIKING many of them. A few years back I worked with a guy who taught middle school science. He was the nicest guy you ever met, he had a kind of Santa Claus aura, bowl full of jelly and all that. Kids loved him and he seemed to have a great time being a teacher. But I knew more science than he did, and I was teaching English. He was hilariously ignorant and he was doing a disservice to those students.
So while personality counts in some cases, I think that we should temper your argument. Your portrait of the successful teacher as “natural”, “spontaneous” and “fun” (to simplify slightly) is one picture of a teacher, but not the only one. As my college professor proved to me, you don’t have to be fun or even nice to be a good teacher. Not that I want to emulate that attitude in my own practice, but the point is that personality counts less than we think. My three big teacher adjectives, if I were forced to choose them, would be organized, knowledgeable and focused. Some people are able to make those traits appear fun and spontaneous and effortless, and more power to them.
Focused, organized and knowledgeable teachers, with an ability to recognize entry points into learning: how about that? Clearly, along with the content you have to understand your audience and play to their needs and desires. Motivation is primary to all learning (or, the kind of learning we want to encourage). Self-motivation is best kind of motivation. A teacher who understands that and exploits it well is really who we are talking about. But it breaks my heart when I see a gifted motivator, a gifted guide, a gifted presenter, with little to back it up.
Dear WA,
You are still basing your assumptions on the students being motivated. This isn’t college. We don’t have a motivated body and the college chap you mentioned would have faced open rebellion from 9th graders. Your robust science chum may have been clueless in the Chris Farley sense, but I’ll wager he made school may bearable for many kids. I’m not advocating a ‘fun is king’ approach but you have to be able to make something dull enjoyable. Too much focus kills the content for a large number of students, they can’t hold it down for 80 minutes. Being able to switch tracks to something irreverent and back again gives many kids that moment they need to breath and start again. This isn’t the ‘likable’ this is empathy. If you never sat through an hour or two of pain then you are lucky – for me that is rule number one. Don’t suck.
Honestly, I don’t disagree with anything you are saying. “Don’t suck” is a fine principle. Perhaps my main point is that not sucking isn’t necessarily a matter of personality. Not sucking might have more to do with empathetic planning than it does anything else. Ok, being nimble and flexible is important. Perhaps understanding the teenage mind and body and situation to the point where you build in breaks, where you plan for play, where the main point is to find an entry point into the material that feels great and enjoyable: what we’re both talking about, I hope. I just don’t trust people’s ability to implement those motivators on the fly or spontaneously to the maximum effect. Even a naturally boring person, with thoughtful planning, an excellent grasp of subject matter and curricular goals, and empathy with and understanding of the target audience, can achieve the same results as a whiz-bang person. The whiz-bang person, in fact, could have the disadvantage of coming to rely too much on the show and not enough on student’s learning or improving. In the end, though, I think our views are simpatico.
[...] Hot: Draw accurate circles. Draw straight lines. Use with paper (see above) for best results. All you need for having a great time in geometry class. That, and a dynamic teacher. (See this post and comment thread.) [...]
So, what’s the solution?
“Let’s evalutate everybody, that’ll surely make the world a better place”?
We’ve had that kind of debate in France as well and everybody agrees everybody should be evaluated.
Yet nobody does as to how this should be done.
A good teacher to me is not necessarily a good teacher to you.
Because “you” are never just an abstract pupil or student entity, you are a human being.
I will be forever grateful ot the teacher who taught me to *read*, not decypher, right – but truly begin to understand how and why a text could have an impact on me. I was about 16. In that course, 90% of my classmates were terrorized. 10% were interested. I was in heaven – the guy changed my life.
It was definitely not fun: we were expected to do our best all the time, and even better. It was all about learning to pay careful attention, to analyze and interpret – it was about learning to think and that is always a painful process, because it’s so much easier not to bother.
Yet that’s not the way I teach because I’m different as a human being and the context is different, and of course the students are.
Maybe my students are entertained and never terrorized but does it mean they’ll remember anything? and if so, what? What if you consider the bigger picture and acknowledge the ultimate goal of teaching and learning is not passing exams but becoming an understanding, autonomous adult and citizen?
How are you ever going to assess that? By making sure teachers stick to the latest fashion in didactics?
Thanks for your comment – it raises some important questions. You’re right, of course – teaching and learning aren’t mechanical processes that occur between machines, they are human activities, and are influenced by all the messiness of human life. In some ways it will forever be impossible to standardize assessments of teachers and students in any meaningful way. On the other hand, surely there is a way to share that experience with others – including administrators – in a way that makes it possible to show the quality of teaching and learning. Administrators play a utilitarian numbers game – I doubt many administrators would want to hire this teacher that changed your reading life. 90% terrorized? I think most admin would opt for the 90% learn things and 10% are terrorized, but that’s just a guess. You are correct, though – education is plagued by fads and fashions. There is something basic that is missed by those trendy ideas.