Dropout Nation

What does a great teacher have in common with Kobe Bryant? They’re both always doing the work to become even better.

One of biggest problems with the nation’s system for recruiting, training, compensating, and evaluation teachers is that it does little to actually identify who is a high quality teacher and what makes them do so well in helping kids succeed. The current approach to teacher credentialing, in particular, does little to assure districts and other school operators that the teachers coming into classrooms are capable of improving student achievement and is not geared toward identifying or rewarding good and great instruction. And while new teacher evaluation systems using objective student test score growth data will help identify good and great teachers (as well as separate low-quality instructors from the pack), they are only one step in learning more about what makes high-quality teachers what they are. 

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Los Angeles teacher Peter D. Ford III offers a few insights on what makes high-quality teachers what they are. Read, consider, and offer your own perspectives.

As the year draws to a close, and I read articles about teacher quality, I ask myself constantly, “What makes a great teacher?” In California the credentialing process has become a procedural marathon; there either isn’t enough, or the right data gathered to determine if it raises student learning for all children. Yet, there are obviously credentialed teachers in classrooms who are not serving children, so there must be other factors that determine teacher quality that the credential process neither identifies nor requires. When I think of the great teachers with whom I’ve worked, there are three key things I have seen.

Great teachers have unconditional commitment to children. They commit themselves to children as if they were their own. A great parent is not a child’s friend in the peer sense, but indeed is someone who does not lead a child to danger and devotes themselves totally to that child’s welfare. When a child accepts that commitment they will either perform their best or at least appreciate the effort, and in time respect you even more. As long as there are people, young people particularly, you cannot treat teaching as ‘just a job’ or students as ‘data points.’ Often, the best people for judging this commitment are the students themselves.

High quality teachers also have subject matter passion. Knowing your subject is a given; great teachers breath, eat, and sleep their subject in all they do. They can find it in all aspects of life, and infuse that into their curriculum. When you can turn a faux pas into a poem, a social conversation into a math problem, or connect a student’s endeavor to an historical moment or person, students will learn in your classroom, and learn better when they leave your classroom.

Finally, great teachers engage in continuous improvement. W. Edwards Deming  was the father of it, the Japanese have a wonderful word for it: Kaizen. Great teachers are never satisfied, always seeking to improve their pedagogy. Two of the greatest Los Angeles Lakers and NBA basketball players, Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant, as they matured their games evolved to remain competitive; continuously improving is why partly they have 10 rings between them. While teachers may have certain curricular activities they do all the time – the same way a great orchestra will always perform Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – a great teacher will work to make even that repetitive event a better learning experience for students.

I don’t think there’s a teacher evaluation rubric or teacher credentialing process anywhere that can capture the full extent of these qualities. Just like an NFL rookie, you’d need to sign a new teacher to a 3-5 year contract and assess 3-5 years of their work to even get a glimpse of these qualities. Ultimately it’s the ‘customer’ who’s the best judge of a teacher’s effort and performance. Some of them won’t recognize it until they have left their class. Personally the best affirmation of my effort has been former students who come to recognize and thank me for my effort long after leaving my class; it’s not the ‘A’ or ‘B’ students whose words I appreciate most, but that ‘C’ or less student in whom that seed finally blossomed.

Teaching is hard; identifying, developing, and nurturing great ones for the students who need them most is even harder.