In your school career, did you ever have a teacher who you thought was a “great” teacher? Did you think he or she was great at the time, or later in your life with the wisdom of age? What did the teacher do that made you consider him or her to be a great teacher?
There’s lots of talk these days about the importance of getting great teachers in front of all of our students as perhaps the most important lever in improving schools. Much of this talk is tied to an increasing focus on teacher evaluation processes used in schools across the country as states are required to adopt prescribed evaluation systems in exchange for waivers from certain requirements of federal education law. Georgia is one such state, and I’ve written in this space before about the state’s new “Teacher Keys” evaluation tool.
So, getting back to my earlier question: What did that “great” teacher do that made you consider her or him great? Was it this? Those are the traits of an “effective” teacher listed in the rubric for Georgia’s Teacher Keys evaluation process. Not a great or exemplary teacher—simply an effective one. Though presented as a list of indicators, the rubric warns that they “should not be used as a checklist.” For those great teachers we all remember from our youth, my guess is that many of them probably did most of the things on this list but that those likely weren’t the aspects that led us to dub them as “great”. Often what makes a teacher great is hard to sum up succinctly and according to the language of typical performance rubrics.
So does this mean great teachers are born rather than made? I don’t think so. A recent book titled Building a Better Teacher explores the question of whether good teaching can be taught or whether it develops more from natural-born talents, and the author comes to the conclusion that it’s a bit of both—there’s both science and art to good teaching. I tend to agree with that broad assessment. But I also am not so sure that the current obsession with trying to quantify “teacher effectiveness” into a single score as Georgia and other states are doing is going to suddenly unlock the hidden potential of emerging teachers or lead us to having a strong teacher in every classroom.
NPR started a series this week in which it will highlight “50 great teachers” past and present. I suspect that most of these great teachers have honed their craft by having the autonomy to make decisions for their classroom, receiving supportive feedback, and seeing a bigger purpose to their work than simply how students perform on a single standardized test (which, by the way, is another component of “teacher effectiveness” scores in Georgia and most other states). NPR’s great teacher series began with a focus on Socrates. If Socrates were teaching today, what would his “teacher effectiveness measure” score be? And would that score be the motivation for him to improve as a teacher and to inspire his students to deeper learning? If it was, I doubt he’d be the great teacher that he was.