There are endless articles, blogs, essays on the difference between good and bad teachers. All the frameworks for teacher evaluation highlight the shades of difference. But to my eye there are far too few adequate analyses of the difference between good and great teachers.
I actually find that latter distinction more interesting, in a similar vein to the Jim Collins inquiry on businesses: how does one go from good to great? And like Collins, I think the difference is qualitative – The actions, behavior, and attitudes of great teachers differ considerably from those of good teachers; it’s not just a matter of degree. (That’s why I find almost all the well-known evaluation systems humdrum – they focus on mere goodness instead of being designed backward from greatness. That’s for another blog).
Let me propose a set of distinctions – admittedly a bit glib – that may have value for sharpening our sense of what greatness is in teaching:
- Great teachers are in the talent-finding and talent-development business.
- Merely good teachers think they are mostly in the business of teaching stuff and helping students so that it gets learned.
- Great teachers are aiming for the future: are these students better able to succeed on their own after me and without me?
- Merely good teachers look mostly to the past: did they learn what I taught and did they do what I asked of them?
- Great teachers decide what not to teach to ensure lasting emphases and memories
- Good teachers cover a lot of ground while making the content as interesting as possible.
- Great teachers delight in smart-alecks and skeptics who clearly have raw but undirected talent.
- Good teachers are often threatened or bothered by smart alecks and skeptics.
- Great teachers know us better than we know ourselves, especially in terms of intellectual character.
- Good teachers merely know us as students of the subject.
- Great teachers get more from us than we thought possible to give
- Good teachers have high expectations and passions, and think that the rest is up to us.
- Great teachers sometimes bend the rules and fudge the grades on behalf of raw student talent.
- Good teachers uphold standards and grade according to the scores students earned.
Here is a report from a student’s science teacher – from the elite British school of Eton, no less – who in a final report makes clear his stance as a “good” teacher:
Alas for this teacher, the student in question grew up to be a Nobel prize winner who cheekily displays this report on his web site and has it framed in his office.
Such stories are not amusing outliers. I have personally witnessed many such reports and attitudes as a student, teacher, parent, and colleague.
I have often in workshops told the story of a former student of mine, Chris, who was mostly successful but viewed as a big pain-in-the-you-know-what by many of his teachers. I saw Chris up close not only as his teacher but as the advisor to the school paper where he was editor. He once got us all in trouble by writing an expose of the work and living conditions of the school’s cafeteria and building and grounds workers – published on parents’ day, no less. The Dean confiscated all the copies. I admired him and fought on his behalf a few times.
Chris grew up to be Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-winning report for the New York Times.
Many talented people in the arts are famously hard to deal with; John Lennon and James Brown are familiar examples. And speaking of talent recognition, Lennon and the Beatles notoriously FAILED their audition at Decca Records in 1962. (I have a high-quality bootleg of the tape: you can hear a song on my band’s site here.) Jaime Escalante, one of the most well-known great teachers, was extremely difficult to work with (as reported in the wonderful Jay Mathews account of Escalante’s work at Garfield HS). Had it not been for his Principal and some other knowing supervisors, Escalante would likely have never accomplished what he did. I saw a teacher in Portland HS in Maine years ago who was the greatest teacher I ever saw – Leon Berkowitz. He refused to join with his colleagues on school reform projects and was notoriously cranky.
There are numerous such stories about Albert Einstein, as readers no doubt know. (Alas, many of them are untrue, such as the story that he did poorly all through school.) But Einstein clearly bristled under the kind of good teachers I am describing (as recounted in Isaacson’s biography of Einstein):
He would later be able to pull off his contrariness with a grace that was generally endearing, once he was accepted as a genius. But it did not play so well when he was merely a sassy student at the Munich Gymnasium. “He was very uncomfortable in school,” according to his sister. “He found the style of teaching – rote drills, impatience with questioning – to be repugnant…the systematic training in the worship of authority was particularly unpleasant.”
Skepticism and a resistance to received wisdom became a hallmark of his life. As he proclaimed in a letter to a fatherly friend in 1901, “a foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”
I once led a workshop on critical thinking and asked teachers to fill out a T-chart with critical on one side and uncritical on the other. Curiously, many teachers proposed such indicators as attentive, disciplined, and follows directions and procedures carefully as indicative of critical thinkers. When I suggested that those sounded to me like indicators of compliance a teacher noted that, indeed, when she had proposed “skeptical” at her table they had rejected it as the hallmark of uncritical thinkers!
This is all very personal for me, as you might guess. I was a smart aleck; I was not a successful student for many years. It wasn’t until one high school teacher and one college teacher saw some talent in me to nourish that I turned the corner and began to believe in my worth as a thinker. I still seethe with dislike for a teacher who never once praised me for anything I did all year (though he was a very good teacher and highly respected by others). I almost dropped out of both college and grad school in the face of teachers who didn’t know me, didn’t care to know me, and only cared to give me low grades to teach me a lesson about hard work and scholarship. When I decided to be a teacher – in part, motivated to right the wrongs inflicted on me – I vowed to find and reward learners who showed potential, whether as thinkers, soccer players, teachers, trainers or unit writers. And I can honestly say that of all I have accomplished as an educator (and as a parent) I am most proud of what I have accomplished as a talent scout.
So, ask yourself, honestly: do your behaviors and attitudes suggest that you are sufficiently in the scouting and talent-development business? Or do they suggest that you are too much in the content-mastery business? (Notice I am not saying that it is impossible to be both; I am talking about the good teacher as being too focused on one and not the other).
Yes, yes, I know the pressures on you; I know the schedules, the syllabi, the standards, the evaluation system, the pressures of 700-page textbooks. Please, consider, however: do you think greatness comes without challenge and sacrifice, in teaching or anything else? More pointedly: do you really believe in the long run that it is mastery of your content that determines a student’s long-term fate? Can’t you think of teachers whose greatness lay in their ability to see and promote – sometimes at the expense of time, rules or policies – what others ignored in you? How, then, do you wish to be remembered as a teacher: merely good? Or great?
PS: For a nice story on teachers who were in the business of talent development and not content mastery, listen to Terry Gross’ re-played interview of Dave Brubeck on his death where Brubeck describes the ‘crisis’ at the end of his conservatory studies. http://www.npr.org/2012/12/07/166724259/celebrating-the-life-of-jazz-pianist-dave-brubeck
26 Responses
I haven’t thought about Jim Collin’s book since the early 2000s. The two lessons I remember were the hedgehog effect and the need to “get the right people on the bus.”
Thanks for the reminders.
The 2nd one is key to school reform at the leadership level. Hiring remains the absolute weak link in schools – many schools often fill slots with credentials and don’t even ask for direct evidence that the person can teach or handle challenging situations in and out of class via video clips of them in action and/or simulations. See my chapter in On Excellence in Teaching, ed. by Marzano on What’s My Job? and the chapter by the same name in Schooling by Design.
Reblogged this on Tantri Almira's Teaching Journal and commented:
A very thoughtful blog about good and great teachers… About grading, giving feedback and judging…
This is an much needed debate right now of how we are attracting and evaluating teachers with the larger aims in mind – to train students to become independent of us and to channel energy and focus to challenges. The personal sentiments elucidated what inspired and continues to inspire you and the opening up of people’s thinking is one of your great legacies.
I agree. i am very unhappy with most of the existing evaluation schemes out there. I think they downplay the keys to great teaching in favor of a safe too-faceted and superficial view of teaching. I wrote a chapter in the Marzano edited Solution Tree book On Excellence in Teaching a few years ago that pursued this called What’s My Job? Defining the role of the classroom teacher.
Great piece! Do you know the book “What the best college teachers do” by Ken Bain? He comes up with a very similar list of characteritics as you do above, based on research he conducted. I loved the book, read it in one go and suggested my institution give it to all our teachers (they didn’t, but I will give it to all the teachers involved in a new undergrad study program I’m designing).
Thanks for this post!
Sandra
Indeed I do know Bain’s book and have chatted with him about his work. I would point out that Bain’s key elements have more to do with making the content come to life, though, than getting to really understand students. For instance, the best teachers establish an environment of critical inquiry. While I agree with his list, it is necessary not sufficient.
You make an interesting argument for good vs. great teachers. While reading your list I reflected on my own teaching practices and have to admit that too often I focus on whether my students simply learned what I taught instead of focusing on whether or not they learned everything within their potential. Too often I find myself stopping lessons or discussions because we “hit the main points, so we can move on” instead of allowing students to really allow their own creativity to come up with solutions to questions that aren’t even being asked.
This kind of supports your work on “The futility of trying to teach everything of Importance,” which my social studies department will be discussing tomorrow. I admit that I don’t like the idea of getting rid of the traditional methods for teaching social studies, yet at the same time agree with your assertion that of course students don’t learn much through the “inert and glib quality of the text.” (Gibbons, pg 45, Nov. 1989)
The problem is that with the limited amount of time educators have available in the classroom, combined with the Federal and State mandates for teaching certain ideas and pieces of information, one runs into the problem of either 1) teaching a little bit of everything in a trivial pursuit manner-which students find dull, and why shouldn’t they, or 2) Focusing on teaching students the habits of mind and high standards of craftsmanship, which doesn’t leave enough time for state-based standards tests related to trivial-pursuit style questions.
My argument is that we really need both, but the system as it is doesn’t allow this. I believe that we DO need those basic, trivial pursuit facts, in order to in turn build on those basic building blocks to reach those high standards of craftmanship so that our students can reach their full potential.
I think when we just focus on one or the other that we are setting our students up for failure either way, either at the front end (failing standardized tests) or at the back end (failing in life). How can we get students through the first part yet still prepared for the second?
I beg to differ. The ‘system’ is happy to have great teachers as long as such teachers are willing to fight for their beliefs and demonstrate that they are also good teachers. As I said in my piece, being great is never easy but I see little evidence that schools don’t want great teachers. I sometimes see idiot Principals but not entire systems eager to get rid of the really excellent ones.
Happy to be reminded of the Futility.. article – one of my favorites, actually! Let me know how it went.
The discussion went very well. After much debate our entire department consensus was that our department does need to move towards changing our best practices, especially in the area of framing our courses towards not just content but also the advanced skills similar to the smart balance tests we may be required to take in the next few years. Also our assessments need to match better with those skills that we consider necessary, which coincidentally line up with our new state standards. (This is amazing because we never agree on anything)
Surprisingly our whole department got behind this idea, mostly because of the support of our school curriculum director. She was very excited about your ideas and said that when she read your article she was so relieved that someone had finally put into simple concepts the ideas she had found to be true through her experiences teaching.
Our school is so supportive of this plan that they are going to provide paid time this summer so we can restructure our units in a pilot program, which was pleasantly refreshing for me to see.
I was wondering if you knew of any good resources or roadmaps available for teachers as far as framing these types of units, since this will be a new experience for many of us traditionalists?
I work at Riverside Virtual School and we incorporate both Art Costa’s Habit of Mind and UBD into History/English courses we create. The two disciplines are integrated alothough separate courses that allow students to explore Essential Questions like “Who should be educated? What is the good person living the good life in the good society?” This allows students to make meaning of great literature and to evaluate primary source documents like the Declaration of Independence with purpose.
Prior to this I ran a TAH (Teaching American History) program were we incorporate historical literacy based on Sam Wineburg’s work. Check out his lessons at http://sheg.stanford.edu/.
I spent three years convincing teachers to teach historical literacy not the standards and promised them the CST’s (California Star Test) scores would take care of themselves. They trends that we see so clear correlation and suspected causation, although I do not have the time to prove causation.
Let me know if I can help with other resources.
I like your list a lot. Instead of looking at this as a way to distinguish between good and great teachers, though, I would just look at it as some things to keep in mind as you work to improve. I have no delusions of ever being great, but still find the list to be a helpful.
You have a list of difficult to measure items – not good for those infatuated with quantitative data. Feeding the beast with content mastery numbers seems analogous to corporations feeding the investors with quarterly earnings reports – relatively easy data to produce, relatively easy system to “game”, and can end up distracting attention from the bigger picture.
Well, the good vs great distinction was really a rhetorical device. Because you can’t bypass good on the way to great. My point was good is necessary but not sufficient. Yet, that lacks the rhetorical punch – and we really should be designing backward from greatness not mere competence. For sure, not easily quantified. But see my very early blog entry on the fact that ANYTHING can be measured as long as we are clear on its indicators and are willing to tolerate margin of error.
I greatly enjoyed this post and was inspired by it. Thanks for putting it out there and thanks for adapting Collins’ ideas and language to the world of teaching and teachers. All evaluation systems I have known fall short because they insist on focusing on the mechanics of teaching. Your list gets at the heart of great teaching. Would you consider posting the link on your Twitter account? Thanks again.
I still haven’t read who the Pulitzer Prize winner was, and I would never call that teacher a good teacher. I suppose it was a different time, but I can’t imagine describing a student in those terms. Perhaps my background in special education has influenced my approach to teaching. My standards for good teaching include many of those you list as characteristics of great teachers. The learner rather than the content was the focus in my professional education. Unfortunately, the focus is now on how much can be crammed into their heads, so they can score well on the standardized tests. The great teacher is a teacher who can blend deep content knowledge with the ability to connect with the students. Becoming a great teacher takes time, trust, and academic freedom. I can’t say I see that those in authority would agree.
Thanks for the thought provoking post.
I’d like to add…
Great teachers have strong beliefs about learning; they create and encourage opportunities for learning to occur.
Good teachers look for the best possible ways to teach.
Thank you for validating me, for taking the edge off my depression. I’m considered “difficult to work with.” I had the same problems you had when I was in school. I enjoy the students other teachers hate, I teach kids (as opposed to my colleagues who teach their subject), and I’m being punished in subtle ways for my positions. I’m tremendously proud of the long-term impact I’ve had on so many students; how so many of them have gone on to major in Spanish, how many have gone on to travel and study in Spanish-speaking countries, how many of them (including students identified as “lazy” and “stupid” by other teachers) have ended up loving Spanish and foreign languages. Thank you, I feel better now.
I think there are many of us out there, chafing under the dreary regimens of schooling, and committed to personal change in students not just content mastery. Keep the faith!
Re-posted on my own blog I started for a graduate level course and and which I plan to keep going throughout my career.
A wonderfully written and concise reminder for all of us, and for me as a newbie in the field. Thanks!
Reblogged this on The Dump: Stuff I found & thought worthy of saving and commented:
Geez, am I great? Sometimes, I think. Feeling particularly pressured at the moment by ‘the schedules, the syllabi, the standards, the evaluation system, the pressures of 700-page textbooks’ and know that it is absolutely not ‘mastery of your content that determines a student’s long-term fate’. I need to keep remembering that. Even with the preponderance of examinations, and benchmark testing and ridiculous shit we’re bringing back from the 80s.
Great post. The times the system has frustrated me most is when we have our “at risk” quarterly meetings to focus on needs of students, but it never happens somehow. One example was a Burmese student I had who was highly impulsive, easily distracted, and was struggling as well with writing in English. The one thing he excelled in was Art, and so I requested that his schedule be changed so he could do something he excelled at each day and not just struggle with all the remedial classes all day. They would not do it that year. Said they would “consider it” for next year.
This article was forwarded to me by the headmaster of my school. As a teacher in his 8th year at both the high school and middle school levels, these are the very issues that I witness amongst my colleagues. I am inspired by this and am grateful for having the opportunity to read this story. I would never flatter myself by calling myself great, however upon proper reflection I am glad to know that many of the things I pride myself on, appear within that description.
I appreciate your perspective. I will be passing on to my colleagues. This is a great reminder of what we strive for. Thank you!
http://alwaysalesson.com
Does a great teacher organize his or her teaching around the extremely talented genius who appears in one out of every 0.01 classrooms, or around the average student or the ones who are need of extra help? Perhaps feeding the students class material should not be the teacher’s main preoccupation, but neither should identifying geniuses be. I would say a better focus is forming relationships with each and every student.
I am a teacher. I can honestly tell you that without discipline and structure students will not succeed. So, if you were a “smart aleck” my job is to channel that energy towards learning. However, I will not compete with class clown nor will I glorify his/her bad behavior. Yes, some students who were “smart alecks” do end up being successful. However, that is a really, really small percentage. I treat all my students equally. It is up to them to take advantage of the education that is given to them. I have never had a student, “smart aleck” or not, inform me that I had failed them in one way or another. This holds true for even the “F and D” students. I do consider myself a great teacher, overall. Am I always great, no.
I think that channeling energy toward learning is a great goal for a teacher. However, I think one of the main points of this article is that we engage students in education. In my experience, this is not done by treating everyone “equally”. Students will rarely remember what you taught them, but they will always remember how you made them feel (or as some say, “how you treated them”). I would argue that we treat students equitably – to each according to his/her need.
In order to become resilient to life’s hardships, students must have a sense of mastery – in one area or another. In my classroom, there is always room for a class clown, just as there is for an athlete, debate team captain, and video gamer. Ultimately, the time and place comes for each of them to be glorified.
It is quite possible that the reason that no one has ever informed you that you have failed them is because, like you, they have conceded to being an “F and D Student” and have taken it up as part of their identity. While I would never use grades as adjectives to describe my students, I think that students do feel the same way that you do – “I am a(n) [insert grade here] student.” In this way, teachers really never can fail a student can they?
At the end of the day, I really am not a good, bad, nor great, teacher. At the end of the day, I am a tool (pun intended) – a pencil if you will. Students will use me to help them write the story of their life. Some come into my class room with a comedy, some with a romance story, and some with a horror story. My goal, is to serve each and every one of them so that by the time they leave my class, they have the ability write their own fairy tale ending. And yes, engaging them and channeling their energy toward learning is part of that goal.