If you are planning to become a teacher, welcome, and prepare to be overwhelmed.

If you are
already teaching, you know this already. After a seminar I gave for teachers recently, we were
standing by the coffee: “My head is spinning! There’s too much to think about: portfolios,
standards-based lessons, differentiated instruction, IEPs, ESTs, continuous assessment,
making sure the kids pass those standardized tests, fundraisers, getting the computers to work,
inclusion, trying to keep discipline in a classroom where some can’t even sit still for a minute!”
As I drove home from that seminar, I thought about how right they were. There seemed to be
two huge but connected problems here: First, teachers today have been swamped by
tasks—often, trivial and unconnected to students—that demand compliance, to the point where
it is difficult for teachers to balance or to discern what was really important. Second, teachers
have a vague (or all-too-clear) uneasiness, based on a hazy sense of how well they were doing.
There was a lack of useful information that ought to help teachers connect what they were doing
to how well students were learning. Students’ standardized test scores, now all the rage,
provide little guidance for teachers and are among the most useless (and harmful) pieces of
data, in terms of helping teachers and future teachers, to say nothing of useless in helping
students actually be successful.
Source: © Robert DiGiulo. Reprinted with permission.
Since I began teaching in the inner-city public schools of New York City in 1970, I have been
absorbed by the question of good teaching. Along with the New York State and City teacher
licensing boards, Al Shanker and the teachers’ union defined good teaching in terms of
qualifications, years teaching, seniority, number of advanced degrees, and so on. But my
firsthand observation of some great teachers contradicted that—I saw no connection between
these paper qualifications and how excellent teachers actually were in the classroom. The skills
and qualities of great teachers seemed to be increasingly marginalized, crowded out by
administrative compliance paperwork (I call it “ditto worksheets for teachers”), somebody’s
Great New Idea, and other time killers imposed on teachers. Later, as a school principal, my
awareness grew of even darker reasons for the downplaying of good teaching, and I suppose
money has a lot to do with it. Simply stated, when one acknowledges someone as being good
(or great), there is a corresponding expectation to pay those people well. So while I have heard
a lot over thirty years about teacher competency and merit pay, I have yet to hear a sincere
effort to acknowledge what is the essence of great teaching. For once that is done, it forces the
question of how we should expect it, recognize it, and maybe pay great teachers well for what
they do. I am still waiting for that discussion.
In a sense, I am writing this piece as a historical document. Great teaching has existed since
one of the first humans—generously and competently—showed another how to make a fire and
how to cook food. Great teaching has been great because it placed the learner’s needs and
interests first. Today, however, I see a tendency to marginalize great teaching by redefining it as
teaching that emphasizes interests other than the needs of students. These other interests
include those of special-interest groups that often hide their interests behind the cloak of reform
and school improvement. They address alleged defects of teachers and/or public schools, and
provide solutions to problems that only they have identified, and narrowly so at that. In these
cases, neither the public’s best interests nor students’ best interests are at the heart of their
“solutions.” Some groups insist, for example, that standardized testing is essential to
accountability. I am not opposed to accountability, and I can agree that under some
circumstances standardized tests can provide useful information. But they don’t inform teaching;
standardized tests are beside the point of great teaching because they are too narrow in scope.
While data from well-designed tests can help inform teachers as to their students’ mastery of
content, those tests cannot provide help for teachers seeking to improve their teaching skills
and qualities. No standardized test for students can ever inform us of a teacher’s enthusiasm,
caring, or belief that students can be successful—three factors that have an enormous effect on
student achievement and self-esteem. We simply have to use other means to focus on these
important traits.
And focus we must. We see great teachers, and we see the undeniably powerful effect great
teachers have on students. Yet I worry that special-interest agendas are distorting (or
submerging) the traditional, commonsense notion of what great teaching is. As proof, think
about what we know works in schools. After thousands of studies (some better than others), we
know a lot about high-quality teaching. We know that there are good and better things that
teachers do with and for students, and we know there are not-so-good things that teachers do.
Yet despite the research data, and despite our commonsense perceptions, how often do we
hear about teachers who do the right things? How often do we see how they do those good
things? I am not simply calling for mere praise for the great, even heroic teacher, although that
is long overdue. I am calling for simply naming, noting, identifying what these teachers do,
teachers whose students are succeeding—academically and socially—despite unfortunate
conditions in their schools and communities. How often do we hear about students who do not
bring weapons to school, students who are not violent? Students who don’t hurt others, students
who have learned how civilized human beings behave, learning much of this, in large part, from
a good teacher? I am only asking for “the facts,” not for a massive public relations campaign
promoting teachers and schools.
When well-organized and well-funded anti–public education voices and special-interest group
voices have reached a fever pitch so that the acts of great teachers and great teaching are
marginalized or disregarded, it is time to speak out. When the elements comprising great
teaching are minimized, it is time to speak out. Again, I am concerned not so much that great
teachers and their successes are being ignored (which they are) but that the qualities and skills
that great teachers bring to great teaching are in danger of vanishing, disappearing from both
the public eye and from the curriculum of teacher preparation. I speak out not as a cheerleader
of great teachers but as a curator who seeks to keep alive the awareness of the qualities and
skills that comprise great teaching. These qualities and skills apply to all levels of education,
from preschool through graduate school, private school as well as public school. They apply to
teaching throughout the world, because they go directly to the heart of how teachers teach so
that students learn most effectively.
As we get to the heart of what really matters in fostering student achievement, we realize more
and more how important the individual teacher is. We know this; we have known this since the
time of the wise Buddha, but we still seem to dance around focusing on the essence of the great
teacher. Teacher education college programs are just as guilty as corporate interests: When
was the last time you heard an education professor talk about great teaching? Is there anything
in any syllabus that refers to great teaching? Yet we know—or should know—that this issue
should not be summarily ignored. Probably the strongest voice is that of University of
Tennessee professor William Sanders (1996), whose research shows how the effective teacher
is more important—as a predictor of student success—than any of the other traditional social
indicators usually blamed for student failure.
Fine. But the devil is in the details, and how we define the “effectiveness” of that teacher is the
heart of the problem. Shall we use standardized test scores? I think not. What shall we do
instead? Richard B. Traina (1999), former president of Clark University, is a research historian
who asked, “What makes a good teacher?” (p. 34). He looked through the biographies and
autobiographies of prominent 19th- and 20th-century Americans, focusing on what they had to
say about the traits their best teachers possessed. Traina saw a thread that ran through their
stories: The best teachers—the memorable ones—were remembered as being skillful and
enthusiastic, having such a solid command of the subject matter that students could “pick up on
their excitement” for the subject. Second, these teachers were caring—they cared “deeply about
each student and about that student’s accomplishment and growth.” Third, Traina said that
these teachers had “distinctive character . . . there was a palpable energy that suffused the
competent and caring teacher, some mark-making quality.” In short, the memorable teachers
were skillful, enthusiastic, caring, and perhaps even idiosyncratic. Dr. Traina’s third
trait—“distinctive character”—is indeed the most elusive category. Although we can’t teach
teachers to “acquire distinctive character,” we certainly can work to not destroy it, by demanding
conformity and narrow definitions of what successful teachers are. Distinctive character is a
fragile naturally occurring resource. Like a gemstone, the distinctive character of each teacher is
revealed as she or he teaches. Our job is to guard it, and not allow it to be shattered.
Aside from this je ne sais quoi of distinctive character, what else do great teachers do that
helps kids learn? Knowledge and “distinctive character” are part of it, but it is also about efficacy,
a teacher’s belief that she or he will be successful, because his or her students will be
successful. And, to achieve student success, great teachers help move their students via three
paths: producing, empowering, and connecting.
Great teachers know that to actually be successful, a student must first do something of value.
Simply telling kids they are good won’t wash. Student success is fostered by the work students
do, by what they produce. This can include participating, performing, creating, practicing,
designing, producing, carrying out an experiment, finishing an assignment, or any of hundreds
of other activities. Worksheets, on the other hand, are all too often mindless, and require little
thinking (input). The quality and value of the output, then, is quite low. Some worksheets may be
okay for practicing, or passing time with puzzles, but not for producing. In the final analysis,
what the student does will have a greater impact on how successful the student is (and feels he
or she is) than what the teacher knows, says, or believes.
Student success is also fostered by empowering students (and students are automatically
empowered when they are producing!). Empowering means actively teaching students how to
help themselves, how to take responsibility for their work, how to get help: How to ask for help,
whom to ask for help, and when to seek help. This is a real-world skill that starts and grows in
class and in school. Students must also be weaned from depending on the teachers to provide
direction at every step.
The third path to student success lies in helping students make connections. Success is
fostered by activities/assignments that draw on—connect with—what students already know,
and/or what they do well. Perhaps it is too obvious to state that what I learn best and fastest is
that which is closest to what I already know; I learn best what builds on what I already know.
What I do not learn well is when I try to make sense of material that is alien to what I presently
know. Making connections is a core tenet of constructivism, and classrooms with a constructivist
orientation are not only the most productive but are happier places than classrooms with
reward-and-punishment teachers, and far, far better than classrooms with laissez-faire
(uninvolved) teachers.
Among its other provisions, the “No Child Left Behind” Act includes a provision that all public
schools have a highly qualified teacher in each classroom. Unfortunately, there is nothing
promising in that goal, especially when we have created so many alternative routes to licensure
that even a measurable pulse may not any longer be a consistent requirement to teach (the
poorest school districts in America tend to qualify almost anyone to teach).
Every classroom should have not merely a qualified teacher but a great teacher. But for this to
happen, we must move the definition of “qualified” back from quantity indicators (test scores,
teachers’ college degrees, number of years teaching, and other items easily tallied) and onto
quality, by teaching teachers about efficacy and caring, about the ways one can empower and
engage students, while allowing teachers to retain their “distinctive character.” What matters at
every turn is the teacher, and all kids deserve great teachers. This need has never before been
so pressing.