What Makes a Teacher Great?
I occasionally take a break from writing about risk and human behavior to write about education--a kind of slow-motion disaster. This fall, I spent months obsessing over an old puzzle, using very cool new tools. The question was, What makes some teachers truly exceptional--and others, well, unremarkable? The story, which appears in this month’s Atlantic magazine, is my attempt to solve the mystery.
I had a lot of help. I got access to a treasure trove of data from Teach for America, which has been studying this mystery longer and more rigorously than any other outfit. Then I spent days sitting in classrooms in DC public schools--classrooms that ran like powerhouses and classrooms where time just oozed by, with nothing much happening. I am grateful to all the teachers, principals and students who so graciously allowed me to observe and who talked to me about the realities of their classrooms.
Eventually, I learned that the way to spot a great teacher is not to watch the teacher. The secret is to watch the kids. In great classrooms, the students were in a hurry, and not just some of them. Their eyes tracked the teacher as he or she moved across the room. When the kids got an answer right, they whisper-shouted, “Yes!” and pumped their fists.
In other classrooms in the very same school, I saw the very same students stare off into space. They took extraordinary amounts of time to staple their homework or sharpen their pencils. They danced silent steps in their sneakers on the linoleum floors under their desks. They smiled at me and waved. When I sneezed, they offered me tissues. They were the same kids, but the adult standing in front of them was not.
This all matters because, as Kevin Huffman put it in a Washington Post column the other day:
[T]oo often when we look at the sorry state of public education (on the most recent international benchmark exam conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. high schoolers ranked 25th out of 30 industrialized nations in math and 24th in science) we believe the results are driven by factors beyond our control, such as funding and families. This leads to lethargy, which leads to inaction, which perpetuates a broken system that contributes to our economic decline.
By now, the research is clear: the one factor that matters most in a child’s education is the child’s teacher. As kids, we knew this. There were great teachers--the kind who made you believe anything was possible. But we always chalked it up to some kind of magical power that few teachers could be expected to possess. Turns out we were wrong.
Finally, we can identify extraordinary teachers—with data, not hearsay—and investigate what they are doing differently. We can even make more of them. The question is, Will we?
Andy Kroll said on January 08, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Hey Amanda,
Thanks for your recent piece on teachers in The Atlantic. It was nice to see a major magazine commit so many words to a critical yet under-reported subject.
I was, however, a bit dismayed to such a narrow approach taken toward such a broad, consequential question--What makes a great teacher? The way it read, the piece’s title, I felt, should’ve been: “What Does Teach for America Thinks Makes a Great Teacher?”
I’ve posted a longer response at Mother Jones, where I work, on my thoughts after reading the piece. It’s here—http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/01/hail-teach-america
Best,
Andy Kroll
Mother Jones magazine
Bill said on January 10, 2010 at 3:52 pm
I enjoyed your article, but the one item overlooked by TFA and pretty much every other study of effective teaching is “How long can they keep it up” Take a look at all of the famous Motivating Teachers (Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, etc. etc.) None of them are in the classroom anymore. As a teacher, I know that the reasons that they can burn out are many and varied, but we need to not only look at what makes a good teacher, but how do we keep them in the classroom and keep them from burning out.
anonymous frustrated lawyer said on February 01, 2010 at 12:44 pm
A few questions
1) Why did you include Mr. Taylor in your piece as opposed to a TFA teacher?
2) Did you talk to any TFA teachers that weren’t any good, or struggling at teaching?
Amanda said on February 01, 2010 at 1:35 pm
I chose to profile a non-TFA teacher like Mr. Taylor because I wanted to do a story about great teachers. And most teachers have nothing to do with TFA, as I’m guessing you know. It just so happens that, relatively speaking, TFA does some of the more rigorous research into highly effective and ineffective teaching. So I was curious to see how the organization’s findings overlapped with other research--and with the experiences of traditional teachers like Mr. Taylor.
I was less interested in doing a story about the pros and cons of TFA--and more interested in whether some of TFA’s findings, over 20 years of trial and error, could help us understand the practices of high effective and ineffective teachers everywhere. And yes, I did talk to and observe TFA teachers who were struggling quite a bit. Like most teachers, TFA recruits find their jobs extremely challenging. As I think we can probably all agree, teaching in a low-income school is an extremely difficult job, one that most people could not do very well.
And Bill, I could not agree more with your comment about burn out. It seems to me that we need to figure out what works in the classroom and then direct every resource--from training to evaluation, from the principal’s office to the state house--to supporting those practices.
Until we do that, teachers--even the great ones--will need to work much harder than they should have to in order to get results.
eren said on April 09, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Great teaching and great teachers have characteristics which are are universally common to great teachers -the following website may be interesting and inspirational to teachers aspiring to be great teachers: [url=http://www.orhanseyfiari.com/arigreatteachers.html]http://www.orhanseyfiari.com/arigreatteachers.html[/url]
Matthew said on April 22, 2010 at 9:26 am
For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication.
John said on July 06, 2010 at 10:30 am
Yes, I think that education is the key for bettering our future, by educating our kids the right way. Thanks for this interesting article and I will keep searching for more great articles like this, electric grill griddle
Alex said on September 02, 2010 at 4:01 am
A great teacher doesn’t care about money, poor resources etc. The only one thing he or she really cares about is TEACHING and making it good. I wish every teacher was such a devoted person as you are talking about.