Finding really strong teachers is not easy. Principals and superintendents must look closely at every teacher and teacher candidate to find expert pedagogues.
If a teacher was an onion you would find that, as in a bushel of onions, teachers come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and flavors. As every onion in the bushel is an onion, some are stronger in their onion-ness than other onions, the same may be said of a faculty of teachers. Teachers come in a variety of sizes, shapes and disciplines and some teachers are stronger in their ability to teach than other teachers. If you peel an onion layer by layer, the first layers typically are very generic, the next several layers begin to taste and smell more like an onion, and finally you arrive at the core layers, the essential essence, that make your fingers smell and your eyes water.
If you peeled a teacher like an onion, what is at the core of a really strong teacher that causes you to stop because you know without a doubt that you have reached the essential essence of expert teaching? The outer layers of a teacher would expose a formal and advanced education, the result of years of schooling. There would be a paper layer with a state seal that certifies this person as a licensed teacher. These layers are only dressing.
Underneath the externals of a really strong teacher would be layers of humanity and compassion for children. Perhaps there is recognition of earlier life experiences when the teacher realized that helping others was personally fulfilling. There may be the kernel of cognition that teaching is a calling, an undeniable and innate drive that cannot be ignored.
So far, you have not reached anything that is essential. Weak and average teachers bare these credentials. More peeling is required.
The next layers expose a significant difference between an onion and a teacher. The core layers of an onion though strong are cool, much cooler than the exterior layers. The core layers of a really strong teacher are hot, much hotter than what appears in the outer layers. The heat derives from the dynamic energy required to work an expert skill set of pedagogy in order to cause a student to learn. In terms of the physics of learning, the teacher exerts forces intended to move the knowledge, skill sets, and thinking and problem solving processes of a learning student toward a learning objective. Learning is displacement; what was becomes something new. It takes expert work to cause great displacement and this work generates a heat which in turn warms up and fuels future teaching.
At the core of a really strong teacher is an internalized pedagogy, the science of manipulating a student’s readiness for learning with learning procedures that cause a student to learn. This harmonized core connects the student to what is to be learned, provides incremental and explicit modeled instruction of what is to be learned, exercises the student’s ability to understand or do what is to be learned until the student can exhibit what has been learned independent of the teacher, corrects errors the student makes in his practice and strengthens correct behaviors while incrementally extending the difficulty and complexity of the student’s abilities, and, finally, connects what has been learned with what is to be learned next. The pedagogy needed for one student to learn successfully may be totally different than the pedagogy needed for another student to learn successfully. A really strong teacher understands the mystery inherent in designing and executing expert teaching.
A really strong teacher stands out from the rest of the faculty. Sadly, as in a bushel of onions where there may be only a few really strong onions, there typically are only a few really strong teachers in a faculty.
Hence, it is the job of educational leadership to be picky.
Select teachers for the children of your school even more carefully than you select onions and other produce. Typical interviewing strategies keep the veil of secondhand information between the interviewer and the candidate. Most recommendations are social and talk around the essence of a really strong teacher.
Spend time getting a feel for a teacher’s pedagogical strength. Invest in the time necessary to personally observe the candidate. Nothing replaces what you see and intuit about the candidate. Video files are close but not good enough.
Verify a teacher’s effect upon all children. Good teachers are able to cause very capable children to learn. Children with distractions are more difficult. A really strong teacher does not stop after the capable have learned but persists until all children have learned. Observing how the teacher engages the distracted reveals the strength of pedagogical skills.
It is a truth that the effect of really good teaching will last a life time whereas the after taste of a really good onion passes in days. Sadly, the effects of average or less than good teaching last about as long as the after taste of an onion.
The following article supports the concept of the expert pedagogue.
“In Pursuit of the Expert Pedagogue” Author(s): David C. Berliner Source: Educational Researcher, Vol. 15, No. 7 (Aug. – Sep., 1986), pp. 5-13