Think back to your days in school – at any level. Can you name your favorite teachers? Could be kindergarten, could be post-graduate advisor. Pick your three favorite. My guess is that most of us can probably do this fairly easily.
Now take another moment to think seriously and identify the reason(s) that each of those teachers made your top 3. Can you make a short list?
I’ve heard these kinds of lists from future teachers for years, so I’ll bet some of your reasons included things like “She believed in me when I didn’t”, or “he made me think”, or “she was hard on me when I needed it the most” or “he inspired me to want to do better and learn more.” Did I come close? What were your reasons?
I think it’s also a fairly safe bet that absolutely none of the reasons included things like “he was punctual and never missed a day”, or “she took direction from the principal well”, or “she always turned reports in on time, and never missed a turn at cafeteria duty.” Please note: those things may be important, and were probably true, but they weren’t the traits that made those teachers your personal favorites.
Perhaps you’ve guessed that I’m still thinking about the column topic from two weeks ago. I shared about two teacher-recommendation forms (and, since then I’ve received a third!) that asked about many of the qualities in the previous paragraph, but none of the qualities in the paragraph before. Apparently there is a ‘disconnect’ between what we seek when we hire teachers, and what really matters in the classroom.
It gets worse. Go back to your favorite-teachers list. I’m willing to bet that not one of your qualities of great teachers included “They helped me score well on a standardized test – they really increased my performance.” (You might have said “He really knew his stuff and could get me to learn it, too”, but you probably didn’t connect it to performance on a test. Those are different.) Again – this was very possibly true, but it’s not what made the teacher one of your favorites.
So, look at our situation: Apparently the qualities we look for when we hire teachers differ from the qualities we look for when we evaluate them, which is bad enough. But it’s also a very real possibility that neither of those sets of qualities match well with what makes a great teacher!!
There are many factors behind this confusion, and it helps to note just three of them. 1) What makes teachers great or successful will often vary from student to student. Good teachers must know their students, how they learn, and what motivates them. 2) Partly because of this, evaluating really good teaching is one of the toughest jobs in education! Good teaching is so much more than increasing performance on skills tests. 3) And partly because of all of this, predicting really good teaching is equally as (if not more) difficult as/than evaluating them. So hiring is obviously not an easy task.
In the midst of all this, our best teachers continue to swim upstream against lots of mixed messages about what’s expected of them. These teachers need our support and encouragement. And they can certainly do without our almost constant blame for an educational situation which is often not of their doing. These teachers will go on to be favorites to our children and grandchildren, and perhaps we need to clear up our hiring and evaluating acts – not to mention our perspective – to help them do so.