Good teaching is a hard thing to define. But I must make the attempt. Very often good teaching is based on teacher behaviors and their descriptions. I want to acknowledge these, but also spend more time focusing on the learners in the teacher’s classroom. Certainly good teachers need to know the content of what they must teach; however, knowledge of content is not sufficient for defining a good teacher, despite the pressures from the political pundits in Washington, DC.
A typical definition of good teaching includes specific behaviors along dimensions like: technology, communication, diversity, and assessment. The good teacher would use technology for personal, professional, and instruction needs, regularly incorporating software and hardware into instruction and the management of classroom behaviors. The good teachers would use communication in professionally appropriate ways including Formal Standard American English on oral and written communication that incorporate current and appropriate terminology (i.e., vocabulary) in all instructional practices; these communications are effective and designed to implement and evaluate instruction, service, and student learning of Formal Standard American English. The good teacher incorporates knowledge of the diversity of learners and other stakeholders into planning, instruction, and assessment. The good teacher uses assessment techniques to measure students’ needs and abilities, to adjust instruction based on those needs, and to present data on the effectiveness of instruction and learning. Notes these last two sentences at least mention students.
My definition focuses on the engagement of the learner. The good teacher gets the learner involved, providing a wealth of ideas and outlets for that involvement, motivating the learner to be active mentally, verbally, and physically. This isn’t about the cleverness of the teacher, although it requires a very clever teacher thinking about engaging learners in the construction of thought and processes that lead to competent performance in various settings with various contents. The students must demonstrate performances, using knowledge and processes that were not available in their repertoires before. The good teacher forms hypotheses about what the learner knows and does, using theories about learners, learning, and information about the particular learner in his/her situation (school and home). The good teacher designs instruction to test the hypotheses about learners in the classroom and collects observational and performance data from the real activity of the learner – this never needs to be test data, but the occasional test is fine so long as it does not take much preparation time.
Based on the data, the good teacher evaluates the success of the instruction for the individual learners. If it was successful, the good teacher continues this form of instructional activity, modifying it and elaborating on it to provide the learners with additional situational context for the skill; however, if it was unsuccessful, the good teacher forms a new hypothesis about the learner, the learner knowledge and processes, using alternative theories about learners, learning, and information about the particular learner in his/her situation (school and home), and designs new instruction based on the hypotheses, testing the hypotheses not the learner, using observation and performance data from the classroom rather than external tests. The good teacher analyzes a learner’s unexpected response and uses additional communication and other data to understand why the learner responds in that way. The good teacher uses recursion to develop curriculum and instruction that fits the learners in the classroom rather than canned programs, assessing his/her understanding of the learners, their motivations, and their performances and revising them based on classroom performance data, rather than tests (although tests might be a small portion of this data). Some of the decisions of the good teacher are short term, only requiring a few seconds or a few minutes, while others require a full, long-term view of the curriculum and where everything fits into it, including the learning path or trajectory that an individual learner is taking, from the initial contact the teacher has with the learning individually or in a group to the final contact sometime in the future, often nine months later, or beyond. This is the art of good teaching, as practiced by good teachers.
Motivation is essential. The good teacher motivates individuals, groups, and the entire classroom community, including those who are stakeholders but not participants in the classroom (parents, other teachers, administrators, specialists, legislators). The good teacher provides inroads into doing and knowing that entice individual learners into active participation in the complex social patterns of the classroom and the curriculum. The complexities of the curriculum allow the good teacher to give learners choices that bring them into owning their learning and the curriculum. These choices provide learners with aspects of control and decision making that further their development as live-long learners, as participants in their own school, and ultimately, as competent participants in society as adults. Since no two learners are the same, the good teacher designs choices that fit the diversity of learners and their learning needs. The good teacher uses a variety of texts for instruction rather than just one and makes sure that every learner has literature and light reading that she/he has chosen within some guidelines of appropriateness.
Getting collusion from the classroom participants in the organization and function of the classroom is essential. The good teacher understands the dominance hierarchy among the children in the classroom and uses it to support the functioning of the classroom society. If the alpha male and alpha female of the classroom work with rather than against the teacher, the social networks in the classroom function to support learning and competent behaviors. Bullying is stopped, and most behavioral problems are solved provided the instruction and materials of the classroom are appropriate to meet learner needs.
Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog
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