From the Front of the Room: What, exactly, is a good teacher?

These questions loom as Ann Arbor Public Schools looks to trim its operating budget. Since teacher pay forms a huge portion of that budget, it makes sense to try and understand how best that money should be spent. Is the current system of teacher-evaluation providing the best bang for the buck? Is it ensuring that decisions to hire, grant tenure, or structure a salary scale, result in the best teachers doing their best work in the classroom? Is money spent on professional development money well spent?

Addressing these questions at the local level mirrors the broader conversations happening on a national scale. Was the recent decision to fire all seventy-five teachers at a struggling high school in Rhode Island a good idea or a lousy one? Will the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top program, which is highly focused on merit pay for teachers, improve our schools, maintain the status quo, or hurt them? What should teachers get paid in the first place and how, if at all, should their jobs be protected?

Seems to me we can’t effectively answer any of these questions without a clear understanding of what good teaching is and when (and how) we know it’s happening.

So, again, what makes a good teacher?

I posed this question to Dmitri Barvinok, a former student now in his first year at Michigan State, who stopped by my class for a visit while home on his spring break, and he pointed to several teachers he’d had at Pioneer, all significantly different in style and personality, whom he’d thought had provided him with positive experiences. Some were letter-strict by-the-book types. Others were more unconventional. Different teachers were good teachers in different ways, he said, but it always mattered if the teacher seemed personally engaged in the subject.

I asked a couple veteran teachers at Pioneer the same question and, like Dmitri, neither answered with anything having to do with test scores. Maria Montri felt that a good teacher was one who teaches beyond the material, meaning that in addition to covering the content, the teacher also tries to see each student as a whole person and attempts to help that student grow emotionally and socially as well as intellectually. Shawn Ashley answered the question more simply. One word, he said, passion. Both for subject and the student. Anybody who doesn’t care about children shouldn’t be in the classroom.

These comments seem to reflect the sentiment expressed in the current issue of Newsweek, in which the cover proclaims in a single sentence written repeatedly on a chalkboard that the key to saving American education is “We must fire bad teachers.” In the lead article, which makes the statement that when assessing what makes schools succeed or fail, what really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. The piece then says, Much of the ability to teach is innate - an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not.)

This approach - the good teachers are born not made approach - would seem to argue that if we want to fix America’s educational woes, all we need to do is train administrators to be able to recognize good teaching when they see it, and give them the resources to attract the naturals to the teaching profession and keep them in it once they get there. If that’s the case, we could save an awful lot of money and time currently wasted on staff development and curriculum alignment. All we’d really need to do is find somebody who just gets it, give that teacher a classroom and say, go ahead, do your thing.

The cover story in this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, on the other hand, argues essentially the opposite approach. That story, titled Can Good Teaching Be Learned? agrees with Newsweek that the number one factor regarding student success is which teacher the student had been assigned to, but rejects the tenet that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars, a quality the writer of the article also described as a certain inimitable voodoo.

Instead, the Times article insists that good teachers can be made, that certain techniques and practices can transform all kinds of different people from all kinds of backgrounds, with all kinds of different strengths, weaknesses, and talents into effective classroom instructors. In fact, when the article asks the same question I did to start this column - What makes a good teacher? - it answers by saying: There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification test on the first try.

Among other things, the article proposes that teachers need to be better taught methodologies in classroom management, that all the passion and creativity in the world won’t make a difference if the teacher is unaware of or simply fails to implement time-tested techniques that compel students to pay attention and do what he/she wants them to do. From this perspective, what’s needed is more teacher-training, more staff development and standardized methodologies, not less.

I’m not really sure which of these arguments I agree with. I do think some folks just have a natural talent for teaching (or coaching) and could do a good job anywhere regardless of circumstances. When, for instance, I staff the instructors at the VOLUME Summer Institute for Creative Writers at the Neutral Zone, I often hire folks who’ve had no formal training as teachers. However, I’ve seen them in action. I know the good teaching when I see it and, by and large, this approach has been successful. Our instructors are terrific and the students experience tremendous growth. On the other hand, I also think certain classroom management techniques I learned in my own teacher-training have been crucial to my evolution as a teacher. I don’t think I’m naturally adept at standing in front of a roomful of students and getting them to do what I want. Had I not learned some tricks-of-the-trade early on, I think I’d have been pretty lost.

So, good reader, I’ll put the questions to you - are good teachers born or made?

What makes a good teacher?

** NOTE - Tonight kicks off the 2010 Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam season. If you’re interested in hearing what the next generation of powerful young writers in this community have to say, you can hear their words on any one of the five following nights: The Huron Poetry Slam on Thursday 3/11; the Community Poetry Slam on Friday 3/12; the Pioneer Poetry Slam on Thursday 3/18; the first ever Skyline Poetry Slam on Friday 3/19; and the spectacular Slam Finals on Thursday 3/25. All the preliminary slams are at the smaller theaters or auditoriums in the respective high schools and are free and open to all students and the general public. The finals cost $5 for students and $7 for members of the general public. All events start @ 7pm. The Finals will be packed so get there by 6:45 if you want a seat. **

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, which meets every Thursday night at 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Thursday morning throughout the school year.