Great Teachers: More Feats Than Team USA

Although the jobs bill wending its way through Congress might help, we should expect to see more teachers lose their jobs this spring as states cut into education funds to balance their budgets, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently told the National Governors Association.

With 15 million men and women in the United States already unemployed, it's hard to swallow more bad news on the jobs front, but Duncan's prediction about our teachers is particularly ominous. We're at a point where we need to hire more good teachers -- not fewer -- and it's almost a given that states won't just skim off the bottom to give the bad teachers the pink slips.

There's been a lot of emphasis on the importance of strong teaching since a 1996 study determined that the people holding the chalk have the greatest impact on student learning. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, says, "Having three years of good teachers . . . in a row would overcome the average achievement deficit between low-income kids . . . and others." Malcolm Gladwell, writing about Hanushek in The New Yorker, says, "The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material," while "the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year."

Given how large a role teachers are supposed to play (though I'm still skeptical that a teacher can make up for disadvantages at home), I was curious how to actually recognize a good one, so I headed off to a recent meeting put on by Washington D.C. Public Schools headlined, "What Does Great Teaching Look Like?" As the principal of my kids' school summed it up: "It's overwhelming what good teaching is. It should give all of us pause about what's involved. It's a hard job."

According to a handout we were given on best practices, for example, excellence means the teacher "has a dynamic presence in the classroom AND delivers content that is 1) factually correct; 2) well-organized; and 3) accessible and challenging to all students." That same teacher engages all of his or her students, checking for understanding, responding to misunderstandings with "effective scaffolding," and "frequently responds to students' correct answers by probing for higher-level understanding in an effective manner." The framework might as well say: all while walking on a tightrope and balancing a grape on his or her nose.

Next we watched a video of a high school math teacher talking about quadratic equations. She roamed the classroom, making it impossible for a disengaged student to slump and hide, and her whole lesson was a series of questions -- questions that plumbed what the kids already knew, connecting previous knowledge with a new idea. Her class was a conversation in which she was warm, used her hands, and said things like, "We haven't heard from you" and "Can you help out?" to draw her students in.

She made it look easy, but I think it only looks effortless in the same way that Shaun White's double McTwist 1260s do. The difference is that teachers are like Olympic athletes who have to go for the gold 180 days out of a year. All I know is that the teacher in the video must have been good, because I didn't get butterflies in my stomach like I always used to get in high school math class. If that doesn't top a double McTwist, I don't know what does.