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

by Elizabeth Green

The teachers didn’t let him stand in the back of their classrooms quietly to watch because nobody ever stood in the back of their classrooms and watched. The same went for conversation. They didn’t talk about their teaching with him because they didn’t discuss their teaching with anyone.

always remembering to spend as much time imagining how students might respond to a problem as he spent inventing it.

this was the most important lesson Matsuyama taught Akihiko: not how to give a lesson, but how to study teaching, using the cycle of jugyokenkyu to put his work under a microscope and improve it.

Each time, after sharing an idea with the class, a student asked the same question: “Who thinks the way I am thinking?”

But together, the routines formed a powerful combination, getting students to ask each other earnest questions—without having to be told.

To solve the puzzles that teaching posed, teachers needed the push and pull of other people’s opinions.

One component of teaching that Japanese teachers often discussed was bansho, or “board writing”—the art of writing on the chalkboard in a way that helps students learn. Each teacher had her own style, but over time, intricate conventions evolved. Usually, a title went in the upper left-hand corner; the problem of the day, right underneath. The writing on the board then proceeded in columns: selected students’ solution methods, then thoughts about how to connect them, followed by a concluding statement (a final formula, definition, or observation). The key was to make the space a visible representation of the lesson’s unfolding ideas.

the class kept a collection of magnets, each inscribed with a different child’s name. When a new idea emerged, the teacher wrote it out—and attached its author’s name magnet above it. The innovation served multiple purposes. On an aesthetic level, it helped set off the students’ proposed solution methods from the other parts of the board. It also made discussion smoother. Talking about the area of triangles, it was easier to refer to “Nori’s hypothesis” than it was to constantly summarize its crux.

Finally, appending an idea with a name magnet rewarded students for sharing thoughts, equipping teachers with a new weapon in their continual war on shyness.

Students with excellent summaries got recognition, and they also served as models, giving others a chance to discreetly revise their notes. And everyone got a few minutes to revisit, record, and (the teacher hoped) remember the key thing they’d just learned.

replacing summaries with a competition to give the lesson a title.

experts—they learned much faster than if they had tried to learn on their own. Working alone, a teacher might excel or innovate, or might not; the outcome depended mostly on the individual. Working together increased every single person’s odds of improving. Through jugyokenkyu, teachers taught themselves how to teach.

Americans wanted answers, not improvement—a report filled with bar graphs and tables, not new teaching cases to study.

“We have this idea that if you discover something quantitatively in a research study, and then you tell everybody about it, that’ll improve teaching,” Stigler says. “The truth is, with teaching, 10 percent of it is the technology or the idea or the innovation. Ninety percent of it is figuring out how to actually make it work to achieve our goals for students.”

The neriage section of a lesson, in which many different ideas yielded to a consensus and a new academic concept, might not make sense to the interpreter—“knead and rise”—but it resonated with Deborah. There was a word, bansho, to describe the art of writing clearly on the chalkboard; another, kikanjunshi, to describe the part of the lesson in which the teacher walks between students’ desks, looking at their work to determine which student should share and in what order. There was a word to describe the process of effectively using students’ ideas to achieve a lesson’s goal and another for the category of mistakes that, when shared with the whole class, offer the richest opportunities to learn (neriage and tsumazuki, respectively). There were key questions for posing the problem of the day (shu-hatsumon) and the practice of observing students (mitori) and the lesson opener (donyu). The words were another product of jugyokenkyu. To talk about teaching and all its components, teachers had invented new words to describe them.

Ahzheona, with her 50 percent scores in a certain category, probably needed a day of tutoring; Jasmine, who scored below 50 percent across the board, needed tutoring every day; and Kendra and Amirah, with the class’s highest marks across all the standards, were ready for a new challenge.

In one class that Doug observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems, alone. The teacher looked the other way, and Doug couldn’t watch the rest. He walked out the door. Teaching did not have to feel that way, like suffocating slowly.

they had not seen the things they needed to learn.

He could explain how their teaching made him feel: good or bad, pained or giddy. But he could not explain exactly what happened or why or how to make the bad moments better.

he had always been an evangelist for the power of clear language to help students understand exactly what you wanted them to do. He often crusaded against what he called “the fundamental ambiguity of ‘shh,’

complaining so much about what students were doing wrong that they forgot to explain how to behave right.

the sensible teacher might say something calm like, “Daniel, put that pencil in the pencil holder and look at me.” But the frustrated teacher is not usually sensible. Watching that pencil sail across the room, and maybe imagining it spiking Lawrenesha in the eyeball or skewering Dante the goldfish, the words flying out of the frustrated teacher’s mouth, more likely, would be something like, “Daniel! I’m going to glue that pencil to your fingers!” Not only would these words fail to describe the correct behavior; they would draw unnecessary attention to the misbehavior. Any student who hadn’t noticed that flying pencil would know all about it now, and the power in the room would shift from the diligent students to the dunce.

Maybe they could call it “What to Do,” to represent the goal of responding to misbehavior by pointing out exactly what to do instead, rather than giving attention to the failure.

when a teacher asked a question and all hands in the room went up but three, and the teacher was happy because that was pretty good. But she never followed up with those three, and the ones who got the question right—she never asked them to take a step further and try to solve a slightly harder question.

Karen and Doug came up with more categories to go along with What to Do. “100 Percent” would remind the teacher to make sure that every single student in the room was engaged, following along, and understood. “Right Is Right” would encourage a teacher to insist on getting the precise correct answer from the student, not a close-enough one. “Stretch It” would demand that teachers press students who easily provide the correct answer, challenging them to take the problem a step further.

Presented with the most charismatic, engaging teachers, some students would still deviate—refusing to pay attention, for instance—or they would forget to follow a rule.

Colleen had created the gestures, she explained, so that she could subtly correct students’ misbehavior without interrupting the flow of her lesson. At the beginning of each year, she taught the three gestures explicitly. For the first few weeks, every time she used one, she would say its name too. But pretty soon, she could pull off performances like the one Doug had witnessed. When she said, “The food in Mrs. Driggs’ refrigerator is scarce because the inconsiderate guests came over and ate almost all of it,” the only person who noticed that she’d also gripped her hands in prayer just between “scarce” and “because” was the student who had lapsed from SLANT. The practically invisible corrections explained her “magical” command of the classroom. By nipping interruptions in the bud, she kept everyone in the room on task.

Asking a class of sixth-graders for attention, Patrick counted down how many pairs of eyes he needed, until the number was just one. The last student was a boy named Dwayne. But Patrick had never said the boy’s name. Instead, he’d just said, “We need one more set of eyes.”

“The death spiral,” he called it. “Let’s say I’m teaching, and Anne is slouching,” Doug said at the workshop in Boston, motioning to a teacher named Anne. “I could stop and say, ‘Just a minute, class. Anne, I really need you to sit up.’ ” He switched perspectives. When he made that move with Anne, what was likely to go through the minds of the rest of the class? “The kids who were least engaged are least likely to get back on task with me,” he said, answering his own question. “I stop my lesson to correct one student, and when I correct that student, three more kids get off task, and then I have to run over here, and I have to correct another student, and then three more kids over here get off task. And then I never catch up. I never win. It’s the death spiral.”

Doug grouped possible responses into six accelerating options, each one slightly more invasive than the last. Just one step above “nonverbal intervention,” a nearly invisible hand gesture like the ones Colleen Driggs used, was “positive group correction.” By positive Doug meant constructive—describing the desired behavior, rather than the problem. “We’re following along in our books,” a teacher could say, posing the statement like self-evident narration, even if it also contained a hint of aspiration, serving to remind the boy in the back that he shouldn’t be looking out the window. To make the point slightly more clear, a teacher could shift to second person: “You should be following along.” Level three, “anonymous individual correction,” was Patrick’s move. “We need two people,” a teacher could say. Often, “it” teachers even fudged numbers, optimistically declaring they needed two when really the number was four or five, a purposeful misstatement designed to create the illusion that the order under request was in fact happening now. Act as if it is already so, and before you know it, it will be.

One ingenious Rochester Prep teacher, Jaimie Brillante, began with a diversion: she gave the whole class a quick, silent task: “Copy it down, please.” Then, with the students’ faces pointed to their papers, she walked casually in the direction of a girl on the right who hadn’t been paying attention. But instead of marching straight over to her, she meandered, picking up two tissues from the classroom Kleenex box, dropping them warmly on the desk of a girl in her path, and peering curiously over the shoulder of another girl. When she took a few more steps over to the one who was her real destination all along, nobody noticed, and they didn’t eavesdrop on her stage-whispered correction either.

“Andrew, I need you with me, just like Jeremy and Anne and David. Now we’re looking sharp!” Doug modeled at the workshop. “So I corrected Andrew publicly,” he explained, “but I did a couple of things. One, I instantly diverted the gaze from him to someone else or something else, and, when possible, that something else is much more positive. So if I said, ‘Andrew, I need you with me,’ then you’re all going to divert your gazes to Andrew, and we’re in that situation where I have to win, it’s all public, and then I can’t afford to lose.” Instead, he let Andrew take the stage for half a second before quickly moving on to Jeremy, Anne, and David and the idea that “we” (read: everyone, even Andrew) were now “looking sharp.”

The sixth and final level was “consequence,” the most visible response.

SLANT stands for “Sit up, Listen, Ask questions, Nod, and Track the speaker with your eyes.”

STAR stands for “Sit up, Track the speaker, Ask and answer questions, and Respect those around you.”

The kids, in turn, were great—funny, smart, sweet, like all the kids he’d ever met. But too often, they marched into class either defiant or sullen. Lifeless. Not happy. “We weren’t treating kids like they were people,” he says.

“Command obedience not because you can or because it feels good but because it serves your students.”

“I would always hear Chi’s voice, even while I was a freshman at Williams, telling me that I didn’t belong there and that I didn’t work hard, that I didn’t deserve to be there.”

“This is where you’re going to end up if you don’t get it together.”

But in practice, the same consequences that seemed necessary to help students succeed could also make them more anxious, even angry. Researchers studying school discipline found that punishment often produced “resentment, retaliation, and/or emotions that are counterproductive to learning.”

students the school most wanted to help. Some left because, fed up with either the discipline or the long school day or both, they sought another option.

A Short History of Progress. The author, Ronald Wright, describes a phenomenon he calls the progress trap, in which societies, pursuing what they think is progress, instead create the machinery of their own demise.

“every child in that room learns the lifelong lesson that instructions don’t have to be followed.” The entrepreneurs had to respond to even the smallest infractions; it was the most important thing they could do to help.

The Bench was like a glorified time out, punishing misbehavior with social isolation. A student on the Bench wore a different colored T-shirt and was barred from talking to peers. The KIPP twist was that students on the Bench did not actually miss class; instead, they sat either at the edge of the room or in a normal seat, separated only by the color of their shirt and the prohibition on talking (although talking for the purpose of class was often permitted).

The students who had the hardest time interacting with each other were also, naturally, the ones most likely to get on the Bench. Some of them would stay on “for weeks and weeks and weeks,”

Choices traded the Bench’s immediate social isolation for the relatively less disruptive consequences of detention and silent lunch. (Instead of eating in the cafeteria, silent-lunch participants ate in a classroom with other misbehavers.) Choices added a new requirement too. To get off of it, students had to deliver a public apology to the class in which their original offense occurred—and the class had to accept.

there is a conversation when the person gives their apology later, and people are allowed to ask them questions when they give their apology.”

“Culture conversations,” they called them. Like Choices, culture conversations had their origins in more choreographed routines, in which teachers would introduce the reasons behind the school’s rules by reading a book or showing a clip from a movie that illustrated the idea they wanted students to learn.

that the students targeted by charter schools—the children of families suffering from multigenerational poverty and a history of racism—face more challenges than their more affluent white peers face. Even

What was Rousseau struggling with? What had made him call out? Why hadn’t he turned in his homework? Then they talked about his response—why calling out was unproductive for the whole group, or why disrespecting the teacher prevented Rousseau from working well with him or her.