Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)

by Elizabeth Green

Like Michelle Pfeiffer’s ex-marine in Dangerous Minds, Edward James Olmos’s Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver, and Robin Williams’s “carpe diem”–intoning whistler in Dead Poets Society, legendary teachers transform thugs into scholars, illiterates into geniuses, and slackers into bards through brute charisma.

The most effective teachers, researchers have guessed, must be more extroverted, agreeable, conscientious, open to new experiences, empathetic, socially adjusted, emotionally sensitive, persevering, humorous, or all of the above. For decades, though, these studies have proved inconclusive. Great teachers can be extroverts or introverts, humorous or serious, flexible or rigid.

The consensus seems to be, you either have it or you don’t.

shamefully serious, allergic to goofiness, prone to skepticism—became a journalist.

Magdalene’s success relied on a body of knowledge and skill that she had spent years acquiring. Teaching, as she practiced it, was a complex craft. Magdalene showed me that the illusion of the natural-born teacher is at best a polite version of the old adage attributed to George Bernard Shaw: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”

How to acknowledge Richard’s good work but also, at the same time, correct it?

“From the moment our children step into a classroom,” Barack Obama said in 2007, “the single most important factor determining their achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it’s not who their parents are or how much money they have. It’s who their teacher is.”

we have for too long treated all teachers the same: they get the same pay raises, the same evaluations, and the same job protections whether they inspire their students like Robin Williams or stultify them like Ben Stein. But the fact is that some teachers are good and some are bad.

By measuring which teachers are successful and which aren’t, we can reward the phenoms and discard the duds, thereby improving the overall quality of the teaching force.

school.” In Finland, the report concludes, teachers “are not rated; they are trusted.”

Neither accountability nor autonomy is enough, in other words, because both arguments subscribe to the myth of the natural-born teacher. In both cases, the assumption is that good teachers know what to do to help their students learn. These good teachers should either be allowed to do their jobs or be held accountable for not doing them, and they will perform better. Both arguments, finally, rest on a feeble bet: that the average teacher will figure out how to become an expert teacher—alone.

More people teach in this country than work at McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, and the U.S. Post Office combined.

The cold truth is that accountability and autonomy, the two dominant philosophies for teacher improvement, have left us with no real plan. Autonomy lets teachers succeed or fail on their own terms, with little guidance. Accountability tells them only whether they have succeeded, not what to do to improve. Instead of helping, both prescriptions preserve a long-standing culture of abandonment.

Teaching was, he said, “the greatest art in all the world”;

After all, in science, the most important discoveries were born not from answers, but from puzzles.

Johannes Kepler, Dmitri Mendeleev, Gregor Mendel—all began by scrutinizing phenomena close up and only then came up with theories to explain them.

By comparing the process (teaching) to its product (learning), researchers could conclude which teaching acts were effective and which were not.

One graduate student, Barak Rosenshine, had a list of twenty-seven qualities to watch for, ranging from the average length of words spoken (perhaps brevity was key?) to the frequency of “reference to pupils’ interests” to the number of gestures (“movement of the arms, head, or trunk”) and paces (walking from one place to another).

A high number of gestures, it turned out, helped improve comprehension; so did a high level of right-to-left movement.

epistemology, the occupation of thinking about thinking.

the best way to keep them focused—was not always the best path to getting a good discussion going. Similarly, after asking a question, the most successful teachers waited a few extra seconds before accepting an answer. But successful teachers also tended to be the most brisk, spending the smallest number of minutes between topics.

the pause between posing a question and selecting an answer—Lee pointed out the logic in the apparent paradox. For a teacher, each second spent waiting for an answer held both promise and danger. On one hand, the longer she waited, the more time the students would have to think. This was good. On the other hand, the sooner she broke the silence with the correct answer, the lower was her risk of exposing the class to a useless diversion.

The question for teachers, as for doctors, was not, What is the best behavior? It was, How do I decide which of many behaviors to deploy for the case at hand? It was a problem of diagnosis. Teachers had to locate their pupils’ pathologies, determine a best intervention, and act.

“The teacher,” Lee realized, “is confronted not with a single patient, but with a classroom filled with 25 to 35 youngsters.”

“The only time a physician could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity,” Lee concluded, “would be in the emergency room of a hospital during or after a natural disaster.”

Teachers not only had to think; they had to think about other people’s thinking. They were an army of everyday epistemologists, forced to consider what it meant to know something and then reproduce that transformation in their students. Teaching was more than story time on the rug. It was the highest form of knowing.

Teaching was indeed the science of all sciences, the art of all arts, as Dewey’s predecessor Francis Parker had put it.

if you see that all of the kids in the one class have this jump or this fall in performance, then you start to believe that it’s something in that class.”

Students assigned to the best teachers, he calculated, progressed by the equivalent of a whole grade level more than students assigned to the worst, as measured by test scores.

Perhaps Hanushek’s most influential finding stemmed from his comparison of teachers’ “effectiveness” (the educational equivalent of productivity) to other characteristics, especially salary.

In productivity terms, there was no difference between a teacher who’d been teaching for three years and a teacher who’d been teaching for thirteen.

Ranking and then rewarding teachers according to their effectiveness might create some problems—including, he suggested, “problems arising from attempts to ‘teach the tests.’

As Mindy saw it, there were two types of teachers: those who chose to teach and those who were born to it.

Other new teachers went through a predictable litany of challenges. They couldn’t get the students to listen, they tried too hard to be the students’ friends, they doubted whether all the children could really learn, they struggled to feel comfortable in the new role. In one memorable case, one of Mindy’s old classmates at MSU came back from her first classroom experience in shock: “The children are touching me!”

And her lesson plans! Organized and comprehensive, they left nothing to chance. All Mindy could think was, Wow. “A natural-born teacher,” she said confidently, thirty-six years later.

“I said, ‘Okay, Deborah, you got to slow this down!’ ”

“I disagree with myself.” To Hy, all this was stunning—an extraordinary episode of mathematical reasoning, enacted entirely by nine-year-olds.

The key to moving a discussion forward was to listen to students’ questions, figure out what they needed to understand, and construct a response to pull them there.

Discussions wouldn’t work if she simply let the students talk on their own. The best exchanges actually happened when she figured out what the students needed to understand and guided their conversation to a place where she could teach it to them.

average Japanese student scored as well on a math test as the top 1 percent of students around the world.

But it was only when he started visiting classrooms—not just poking a head in, but sitting through an entire lesson—that Stigler noticed the deeper differences. Japanese math teachers led class with a different pace, structure, and tone than did other countries’ teachers. Instead of a series of problems, the teachers used just one, and instead of leading students through procedures, they let students do much more talking and thinking.

Thirty-one percent of the American lessons contained some kind of an interruption, either a PA announcement or a visitor walking in to deal with administrative business (like collecting the lunch count). Zero of the Japanese lessons did.

American teachers rarely talked about lesson structure—the way class proceeds from a beginning to a middle to an end—and yet, watching each individual teacher at work, Stigler felt as though they’d all read the same recipe. “A cultural script,” he called it. The American and Japanese scripts were the most different from each other—a limerick versus a sonnet.

The Japanese teachers, meanwhile, turned “I, We, You” inside out. You might call their version “You, Y’all, We.”

Americans asked a lot of simple questions and sought quick answers. 1 − 4: What does it equal? Japanese teachers, working at the slower pace provided by a single focused problem, used questions not simply to understand whether the child had the right answer, but to peek into her mind, discerning what she understood and what she didn’t: Who had the same thinking? Anything to add to this way of thinking? Did anybody else use another way?

Stigler called the second most common question in the Japanese lessons “check status”: Who agrees?

Neither of the two Japanese teachers asked a “calculate” question, and neither of the Americans asked a “check status” question.

the overhead forced light onto everything the teacher wrote. A strategically placed sheet of paper, meanwhile, covered up everything but the latest problem. Guiding students step by step, teachers brought all eyes to the immediate idea—and prevented any reflection on what came before. In Japan, where teachers cared more about the attention students paid to the ideas as they unfolded, a chalkboard that could hold the full trajectory of forty-five minutes’ worth of insights served teachers better.

The Americans produced wonderful intellectual work on what teaching could look like, but they had failed to implement any of it.

What happened in Japan as a matter of everyday business (meetings between professors and teachers) was, in the United States, a revolutionary act. The realization helped explain something else that had been puzzling him.