Last year I began an occasional series of brief posts dedicated to featuring books, articles, and research papers that can foster professional growth.  It’s well past time to revive that concept, and as a first offering for the new year I highly recommend The Atlantic’s What Makes a Great Teacher? by Amanda Ripley.  Featured in the January/February issue, Ripley’s story attempts to address this timeless question using recently released data from Teach America, a non-profit organization dedicated to placing high-quality teachers in low-income communities.

The impact of great teaching is well documented if not well understood.  A decade ago, Robert Marzano found that school-level and teacher-level factors account for approximately 20 percent of the variance in student achievement.  While this  may not seem significant, a student scoring at the 50th percentile who spends two years in an average school, with an average teacher, is likely to continue scoring at the 50th achievement percentile.  Spending two years in a highly effective classroom with a highly effective teacher, however, can raise achievement to the 96th percentile (Marzano, 2003).

What, then, makes for a great teacher?  In reviewing student achievement data, Teach for America found that highly effective teachers “constantly reevaluate what they are doing, avidly recruited students and their families into the process,  maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning, planned exhaustively and purposefully by working backward from the desired outcome, and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”

In evaluating which traits would best predict teacher effectiveness, Teach for America found that long-regarded qualities such as reflection and self-awareness did not matter nearly as much as a high degree of “life satisfaction” and a track record of perseverance.  Recognizing these characteristics is but one step toward school improvement; current practitioners must be evaluated in terms of their effectiveness as well.  And while test scores should not be the only yardstick for success, charisma, ambitious lesson objectives, and communication skills are not sufficient benchmarks unto themselves.

Whether you are a pre-service educator or a seasoned veteran, I hope you’ll find time to read Ripley’s article and learn more about what separates good from great teachers; the answers, which I’ve only briefly touched on here, may surprise you.

N.B.  As background reading, you may wish to consider School, Teacher, and Leadership Impacts on Student Achievement by Kirsten Miller.

Posted: 01|14|10 at 11:31 am. Filed under: Professional Development, Weekend Reading.
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