Tbers,
The posting below looks a some qualities that make a good teacher. It is
from a list of ten such qualities appearing in Chapter 1:What Makes a Good
Teacher?, by Peter C. Beidler in Inspiring Teaching, Carnegie Professors of
the Year Speak, John K. Roth General Editor. Anker Publishing Company, Inc.,
Bolton, MA. Copyright © 1997 by Anker Publishing Company, Inc. All rights
reserved. ISBN 1-882982-13-4 Anker Publishing Company, Inc. 176 Ballville
Road P.O. Box 249 Bolton, MA 1-882982-14-2. [www.ankerpub.com] Reprinted
with permission.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD TEACHER?
In this essay I want to talk about ten of the qualities that make a good
teacher. My method is absolutely unscientific. Readers who want to know
what exerts say about good teaching should stop reading right now and open
to a different page of Inspiring Teaching. Readers who want to know what
Pete has noticed about good teaching are welcome to read on. My evidence is
personal, memorial, observational, and narrow. I have known teachers in
Indiana, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, England, and China. Like Henry David
Thoreau, I refuse to apologize for writing so much about myself. There is,
simply, no one else I know as well. My hope is that my readers will be
inspired to think far less about what I have noticed makes a good teacher
than about what they themselves have noticed.
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NOTE: Abbreviated list chosen by Rick Reis. If you would like an electronic
copy of all ten qualities described by Beidler just send an email to
[log in to unmask]]
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1. Good Teachers Really Want to Be Good Teachers
Good teachers try and try and try, and let students know they try. Just as
we respect students who really try, even if they do not succeed in
everything they do, so they will respect us, even if we are not as good as
we want to be. And just as we will do almost anything to help a student who
really wants to succeed, so they will help us to be good teachers if they
sense that we are sincere in our efforts to succeed at teaching. Some
things teachers can fake. Some things teachers must fake. We have, for
example, to act our way into letting our students know that we can't think
of any place we would rather be at 8:10 on a Friday morning than in a class
with them talking about the difference between a comma splice and a run-on
sentence. An acting course is a good preparation for a life in the
classroom because it shows us how to pretend. Our students probably know on
some level that we would rather be across the street sipping a cup of
Starbucks coffee than caged up with 24 paste-faced first years who count on
our joyous enthusiasm and enlivening wit to be the cup of Starbucks that
will get them ready for their 9:10 class. But they will forgive our
chicanery, even if they suspect that we are faking our joy. They will know
it by the second day, however, if we don't really want to be good teachers,
and they will have trouble forgiving us for that. Wanting-really, truly,
honestly wanting-to be a good teacher is being already more than halfway
home.
2. Good Teachers Take Risks
They set themselves impossible goals, and then scramble to achieve them. If
what they want to do is not quite the way it is usually done, they will risk
doing it anyhow. Students like it when we take risks. One of my own
favorite courses was a first-year writing course in which I ordered no
writing textbook for the course. On the first day I announced, instead,
that my students and I were going to spend a semester writing a short
textbook on writing. It was, I said, to be an entirely upside-down course
in which the students would write lots of essays, decide as a group which
ones were best, and then try to determine in discussion what qualities the
good ones had in common. Whenever we hit upon a principle that the good
essays seemed to embody and that the weak papers did not, we would write it
down. Then we eventually worked our discovered principles into a little
textbook that the students could take home with them. It was a risky
course. It was built on a crazy notion that first-year college students in
a required writing course could, first of all, tell good writing from
less-good writing, and, second, that they could articulate the principles
that made the good essays better. My students knew I was taking a risk in
setting the course up that way, but because they knew that my risk was based
on my own faith and trust in them, they wanted me-they wanted us-to succeed.
We teachers have something called academic freedom. Too many of us
interpret that to mean the freedom from firing. I suggest that we should
interpret it rather as the freedom to take chances in the classroom. I love
taking risks. It keeps some excitement in what is, after all, a pretty
placid profession. I like to try things that can fail. If there is no
chance of failure, then success is meaningless. It is usually easy enough
to get permission to take risks, because administrators usually like it when
teachers organize interesting and unusual activities. For some risky
activities it may be best not to ask permission, partly because the risks
that good teachers take are not really all that risky, and partly because it
is, after all, easier to get forgiveness than to get permission. Teachers
who regularly take risks usually succeed, and the more they succeed the more
they are permitted-even expected-to take risks the next time. Taking risks
gives teachers a high that is healthy for them and their students. It makes
good teaching, good learning.
4. Good Teachers Never Have Enough Time
Just about all of the good teachers I have known are eternally busy. They
work 80-100 hour weeks, including both Saturdays and Sundays. Their spouses
and families complain, with good reason, that they rarely see them. The
reward for all this busy-ness is more busy-ness. The good teachers draw the
most students, get the most requests for letters of recommendation, work
most diligently at grading papers, give the most office hours and are most
frequently visited during those office hours, are most in demand for
committee work, work hardest at class preparations, work hardest at learning
their students' names, take the time to give students counsel in areas that
have nothing to do with specific courses, are most involved in professional
activities off campus.
For good teachers the day is never done. While it does not follow that any
teacher who keeps busy is a good teacher, the good teachers I know rarely
have time to relax. The good teachers I know find that they are as busy
teaching two courses as teaching three. They know that they do a much
better job with the two courses than the three because they give more time
to the individual students, but they also know that for a responsible
teacher the work of good teaching expands to fill every moment they can give
to it. They might well complain about how busy they are, but they rarely
complain, partly because they don't want to take the time to, partly because
they don't like whining. Actually, they seem rather to like being busy. To
put it more accurately, they like helping students-singular and plural-and
have not found many workable shortcuts to doing so.
7. Good Teachers Try to Keep Students-And Themselves-Off Balance
I have learned that when I am comfortable, complacent, and sure of myself I
am not learning anything. The only time I learn something is when my
comfort, my complacence, and my self-assurance are threatened. Part of my
own strategy for getting through life, then, has been to keep myself, as
much as possible, off balance. I loved being a student, but being a student
meant walking into jungles where I was not sure my compass worked and didn't
know where the trails might lead or where the tigers lurked. I grew to like
that temporary danger. I try to inject some danger into my own courses, if
only to keep myself off balance. When I feel comfortable with a course and
can predict how it will come out, I get bored; and when I get bored, I am
boring. I try, then, to do all I can to keep myself learning more. I do
that in part by putting myself in threatening situations.
A couple of decades ago, I developed a new teaching area-an area I had never
had a course in when I was a student: Native American literature. It would
have been more comfortable for me to continue with the old stuff I knew, but
part of what I knew is that I detest stagnation. I rashly offered the
department's curriculum committee a new course. When they rashly accepted
it, I was off balance, challenged by a new task in a new area. I now teach
and publish in Native American literature regularly.
In 1988 I began to feel that I was growing complacent teaching the
privileged students I have always taught at Lehigh University-mostly the
children of upper middle class white families. It was getting too
comfortable, too predictable. I applied for a Fulbright grant to teach for
a year in the People's Republic of China. When the appointment came
through, I was scared, but I signed the papers and not long after went with
my wife and four teenaged children to Chengdu in Sichuan Province to take up
the teaching of writing and American literature to Chinese graduate
students. I have never felt so unbalanced in my life-teaching students who
could just barely understand me, even when I was not talking "too fast." It
was a challenge to teach such students to read the literature of a nation
most of them had been taught to hate and to write papers in a language that
was alien to them. And that was only part of the unbalance. The rest was
riding my bicycle through streets the names of which I could not read,
eating with chopsticks food that was almost always unrecognizable and often
untranslatable because nothing quite like it grew in my native land. Never
have I felt so unbalanced for so long a time, but never have I learned so
much in so short a time.
I have noticed that good teachers try to keep their students off balance,
forcing them to step into challenges that they are not at all sure they can
handle. Good teachers push and challenge their students, jerking them into
places where they feel uncomfortable, where they don't know enough, where
they cannot slide by on past knowledge or techniques. Good teachers, as
soon as their students have mastered something, push their best students
well past the edge of their comfort zone, striving to make them
uncomfortable, to challenge their confidence so they can earn a new
confidence.
9. Good Teachers Do Not Trust Student Evaluations
Neither do bad teachers. But there is a difference in their reasons for
distrusting them. I have noticed that good teachers, when they get really
good evaluations, don't quite believe them. They focus instead on the one
or two erratic evaluations that say something bad about them. They good
teachers tend to trust only the negative evaluations: "I wonder what I did
wrong. I suppose I went too fast, or perhaps I should have scheduled in
another required conference after that second test. I wish I could
apologize to them, or at least find out more about what I did wrong." The
not-so-good teachers also do not trust student evaluations, but they
distrust them for difference reasons. They tend to trust the positive
evaluations but not the negative ones: "Those good evaluations are proof
that I succeeded, that my methods and pace were just about right for these
students. The others just fell behind because they were lazy, because they
never bothered to read the book or study for the exams. Naturally they did
not like my course because they put nothing into it. Besides, how can
students judge good teaching, and anyhow, what do they know? Anyone can get
good student evaluations by lowering their standards, being popular, and by
pandering to the masses." Good teachers tend to discount the positive
evaluations, however numerous they may be; less-good teachers tend to
discount the negative evaluations, however numerous they may be.
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