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

by Elizabeth Green

Teaching was more than story time on the rug. It was the highest form of knowing.

There was no magic bullet that took students’ ideas and created a rich conversational environment. But there were better and worse ways of making sense of their comments—and better and worse ways of responding to them.

“When you want them to follow your directions,” the colleague suggested, “stand still. If you’re walking around passing out papers, it looks like the directions are no more important than all of the other things you’re doing. Show that your directions matter. Stand still. They’ll respond

Teaching did not have to feel that way, like suffocating slowly.

Watching again, he could see that the gestures clearly meant something, both to Colleen and to her students. Two fingers to her eyes—that meant “track the speaker,” code for paying attention to the person talking, usually another student. The fly swat, applied to a raised hand, meant “I’m not taking questions right now.” And the prayer sign reminded students to get into the attentive position that no-excuses schools called SLANT or STAR, a back-straight pose tied off with primly clasped hands.

“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.

“Perhaps,” wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof two years later, citing the calculations, “we should have fought the ‘war on poverty’ with schools—or,” he added, “with teachers.