Great Teaching

Amanda Ripley’s article in The Atlantic (Jan./Feb. 2010) examines data on thousands of teachers from “Teach for America” to shed light on what makes a teacher great (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/). The findings?
1. “First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students.”

2. [Great teachers] “were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when [Steven] Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: ‘They’d say, “You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.” When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.’ Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.”

3. Great teachers “avidly recruited students and their families into the process;”

4. Great teachers “maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning.” “For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.”

5. Great teachers “planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome;”

6. Great teachers “worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”

Some of the findings may appear counterintuitive: “Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.” Presented with Farr and Ripley’s list, however, a lot makes sense. Who could really argue?

I don’t want to argue with the value of such a list, but I do want to point to its limits. Isn’t there—shouldn’t there be—a significant difference between helping “a new teacher achieve success” and achieving “greatness” as a teacher? Ripley—and, I assume, the “Teach for America” data—simply don’t make this distinction clear. Are we examining master teachers, or are we finding statistical correlations among practices regarding really good new teachers and other, not-so-good new teachers?

More important is the distinction between a great teacher as found in statistics and an actual teacher facing an actual student. What this research defines as a “great teacher” is one who assists a class in achieving better scores on standardized, grade-level assessments than other, less great teachers do. This is beyond reproach. Although standardized tests are execrable political tools and standards themselves are often very low (in order to allow a significant percentage of students to pass them), who wants a teacher who can’t do a good job of this? But is this measure enough to define greatness?

I had a few great teachers. One was my high school German teacher, Dr. Macht. He was a low-key raconteur, easily distracted. He was a World War II veteran, and chose to study German on the G.I. Bill in order to read Nazi documents in order to understand the atrocities he had witnessed. He had endless interesting stories about the war and his life. “Boys, let me tell you a story,” he’d begin, looking out the window. And that was that. No more German grammar or vocabulary for that day. But, in the end, I learned a tremendous amount from him, and received my highest achievement test (now called an SAT II) score in German. My point here is twofold. First, a lot of students didn’t think he was a very good teacher, often for the very reasons I liked and appreciated him. And, second, on the list of six qualities from “Teach for America,” he probably scores well below 50%. He was great for me, not so great for others, and, statistically, maybe not that great.

Another teacher, Mr. Tomlinson, a science and math teacher, was frequently acknowledged to be a great teacher, but I just never found that I learned that much from him. He was likeable and clear, but also slow-paced and methodical. For me, any sense of the value of the study as a whole, how the parts fit together, was largely missing. And yet astronomer and professor William Kaufmann III so loved Mr. Tomlinson that he dedicated his book, Discovering the Universe, a well-known astronomy textbook, to him. Another student, a highly successful lawyer, now retired, credits Mr. Tomlinson with literally saving his life as a teen, giving his life sufficient meaning at a time when he was seriously contemplating suicide. Mr. Tomlinson certainly scores more highly on the “Teach for America” criteria than Dr. Macht would; I’d give him, minimally, a strong 4 out of 6. But, for me, he wasn’t that great.

I have written elsewhere on this blog about a third great teacher, Howard Gruber (see "Howard Gruber, Practical Idealist”). But the man whom I met as a great teacher, toward the very end of his career, endlessly frustrated other students with his repetition and with his (beautifully) open-minded refusal to define things too clearly that he believed should not be defined too clearly. Great for me—top two or three—not so great for some others.

My main point is that, as a student, it simply doesn’t matter whether or not anyone else—or some set of statistical criteria, however accurate and admirable—define a particular teacher as “great.” Malcolm Gladwell, in “Most Likely to Succeed,” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell), based on research from the University of Virginia, describes the importance of an emphasis on teaching instead of an emphasis on schools. (“Your child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”) Amanda Ripley writes about great teachers according to valuable statistical correlations. But we can go further, at least in our imaginations and in our ideals, and picture not some abstract “great teacher,” but the teacher who will be great for us, or great for our children, who will help them set their lives on course, or, sometimes, save them.