Good vs. Great Teachers

This may sound blasphemous coming from someone who has a couple of graduate degrees in Education ... but teachers are born and not made.

Let me amend that: great teachers are born and not made.

In a previous professional incarnation as a boarding school master, I was responsible for recruiting, mentoring, and evaluating teachers new to the vocation. Every year I would sift through hundreds of résumés from graduates of the best liberal arts colleges and universities in America, graduates who had majored in American Literature or Political Science or Physics, graduates who were committed to teaching.

I got to choose six. Then I spent an entire year with those six, teaching them how to be teachers.

The six were bright, passionate, and idealistic. They wanted to change the world.

I wanted them to be great teachers. So I paired them with Master Teachers who were experienced and willing to share their expertise. We read books, we discussed, and we practiced. We worked on organization and communication and presentation. And then they taught.

Some of them were mediocre teachers, some of them were good teachers, and only a few of them were great teachers.

Because I wanted to believe that anyone could be a great teacher, it took me several years to come to terms with the fact that, while it is possible to teach teachers how to be good teachers, it is impossible to teach teachers how to be great teachers.

Good teachers can learn pedagogical techniques that will allow them to manage a classroom, to transmit information, and to facilitate discussions ... but they will never be great teachers.

For those qualities that separate the good teachers from great teachers, the conventional from the inspirational, those qualities - empathy, a sense of humor, compassion, artistry, patience, justice, imagination, integrity, passion, humility, and grace amongst others - are intrinsic.

If a good teacher possess a rudimentary sense of empathy, it might be possible to cultivate that empathy so it becomes more accessible and more refined. However, it is impossible to nurture seeds in soil that is infertile, and it is impossible to teach what is funny and what is not, what merits compassion and what does not.

Those teachers who possess an intrinsic ability to perceive and differentiate between subtleties, those teachers will be great. Those teachers who serve as beacons, who inspire their students to heights to which they themselves did not know they were capable, those great teachers are born and not made.

--Steve McKibben
1/29/06