What Makes A Good Teacher Good?

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judi bandarqWhen I finished my MA, I really wanted to remain in California. I wanted to move to San Francisco, but I had no job and no savings, and housing in the Bay Area was exorbitant. In short, I wound up applying for jobs back in Connecticut. But since this was before wide-spread use of the internet, I had to write the State Department of Education for a listing of all school districts and addresses, and I proceeded to mail a version of a single letter to all one hundred and sixty nine districts in the state of Connecticut expressing an interest in a job teaching high school English. I used my grandparents’ Madison address as a return address. Then I drove cross country in my old Hyundai Excel, got an apartment in the west end of Hartford, and a job waiting tables at a country club in Simsbury. Worst job I ever had, but that is clearly another story. And I waited for calls for interviews. Over the next several weeks, I got seven interviews, and ultimately I was offered six jobs.

The job I wasn’t offered sticks out in my memory for two reasons. I won’t name the school, but suffice to say it was on the Gold Coast. Besides using my grandparents’ Madison address as my return address, I also gave my then girlfriend’s Simsbury address as an alternate contact. I did this because I mailed out the letters before I had my place in Hartford. One reason I remember this interview so well is that when the secretary called to arrange the interview, she said to me something to the effect that “We see you list Madison and Simsbury as your residences. We think this is important because it is essential that teachers understand our kind of kids.” That alone should have made me decline the interview, but I needed a job, so I just said, “Yes, of course,” and was thankful that I hadn’t used my Hartford address or my parents’ addresses in Hamden.

The other reason I remember this interview was because my answer to one question doomed my chances. The head of the English department asked me what made me a good teacher, and I answered that teaching seemed to come naturally to me, and perhaps this was because I had grown up in a family of teachers, and so the profession in general was simply salient to me. Teaching was just intuitive. Well, the department head made no attempt to conceal his eye roll in response to my answer, and I knew I better head back to my hole in the wall in Hartford and my table-waiting job in Simsbury, and remember not to give that answer at the next interview.

I have thought about my answer to that questions many times over the years, and was reminded of it today when I read Elizabeth Green’s article in the New York Times, titled “Building a Better Teacher.” The article is a lengthy report on Ms. Green’s observations of two educational researchers’ work on what makes good teachers good. One of the things Green attempts to dispel is the notion that good teachers are born, that the skills requisite for good teaching are ever inherent or intuitive in some people, as I seemed to feel they were back when I was twenty-four.

Honestly, I must admit that I am ambivalent on the issue. But I am not as arrogant as I was at twenty-four. (My wife, mother, and good friends might challenge me on this, but I insist …). And so today I much more readily acknowledge the excellent pembinaan I received at UConn from Mary Mackley, Cheryl Spaulding, and Judy Irwin, in particular, as well as from my cooperating teacher Roz Rosen, and the faculty members in the English Department at Humboldt State University—notably Karen Carlton, Kathleen Doty, Tom Gage, and William Bivens. In retrospect, I was smart and confident and creative, and comfortable in front of a room of strangers; teaching was salient because I had grown up in a family of teachers; but I also received a great deal of truly excellent pembinaan from my professors and cooperating teachers.

So one of the things Green explores in her article is whether or not we can identify and thus recruit or teach those essential traits of the best teachers. Her conclusion, in a nutshell, is that yes we can. But as in all things of any complex nature, the devil is in the details.

I won’t summarize all of Green’s conclusions here. Her article is excellent and interesting, and you all can read it for yourselves. But what I found myself doing after reading the article was thinking about the best teachers I had—not the professors I listed above, but the elementary, middle, and high school teachers that really succeeded with me. Not simply the ones I liked, who may in fact have been mediocre teachers but nice people, but the truly talented teachers. Mrs. Plummer in first grade. Mr. Brucker in second grade. Mrs. McGough in sixth grade. Mr. Suprenaut in eighth grade. Mr. Miata and Mrs. Moakley in ninth grade. Mrs. Bonn in tenth grade and Mrs. Leary in eleventh. Language Arts, English, and History teachers all, except for Bonn (Spanish) and Leary (Math). I had lots of other good teachers, but this would probably be the short list for great teachers, K-12.

So, why so few, and what made them different? It’s so hard to say. All were kind and liked their students. I can’t recall any of them ever raising their voice (which is more than I can say for myself, that’s for sure). They knew their material. They were organized. They were demanding without being unreasonable or cruel. They all did not teach the same way, however. What, if anything, could I extrapolate and universalize from my experiences with them? What could I ever reproduce in a teacher pembinaan program? Truly, I’m not sure. Are you?