Every adult who attended public school knows the truth of this statement: there are teachers and there are gifted teachers. We are taught by the former, but we are inspired and grow at the feet of the latter. Gifted teachers are extraordinary human beings. It is the nature of their extraordinary being that makes them gifted teachers.
What do we know?
A school faculty is much like a professional baseball team. While all pro ballplayers met a high standard of screening to make the team, there still are significant differences between players who hit .250 year after year, the league average, and those who hit .300, a threshold for Hall of Fame candidates. An MLB roster has 28 players. A successful team lists an all-star or three, several players with all-star like statistics, and twenty or so who are steady and dependable players. The combination of steady and dependable players and a few all-stars content for league pennants.
Most teachers in a school faculty are .250 players. Day in and day out they are present and prepared to teach their assigned curriculum to children in their classrooms. Day in and day out they don’t make significant teaching errors. In the same days, they also don’t teach many supernal lessons that light up student learners or cause children to have “Aha” moments.
Some may read this a putdown of many teachers, but it is not. The strength of public education is the steady and solid work of regular classroom teachers. They are how we know and understand reading and writing, history and geography, math, art, music, PE, and speak at little Spanish.
Most teachers on a school faculty may be good at several skills sets for quality teaching; a gifted teacher elevates the performance of skills sets because of innate qualities of insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, and friendship. These qualities certainly lie within regular teachers, but they remain fallow compared to the same qualities that burn brightly in a gifted teacher.
Game changers.
Children know. They know their teachers who light them up on a frequent or daily basis versus their teachers who turn on the classroom lights and say, “Take out your books”. A teacher who lights up children is a pathfinder to deeper learning. Their insights into curriculum and pedagogy are 3D. They know the sequence of facts and ideas and skills children need to learn to climb Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, but they don’t stop at Remembering and Understanding. They push harder with “Tell me more, explain that in your own words, how is it similar to and different than”. Their students are used to the “so what and now what can you do with this” questions.
I marvel at the fact that gifted teachers, real game changers, don’t know who they are. They just are. They are unconscious of the ways they teach and relate to children.
I am told that mathematics is the creation and use of elegant solutions to explain our world. Simplicity and insightful are words that few strugglers with trigonometry, like me, understand. Yet, I watch gifted math teachers help children to patiently unravel a math problem into understandable questions in their native language. Gifted math teachers teach students to see the math question within the forest of words and digits on the page. Insight is understanding what one is being asked to learn and the ability to state it in simple terms. These teachers see problems, not just mathematical problems, differently and they teach children to see and think differently. It is a gift.
My favorite band teacher is just a boy in man’s clothing playing his horn. When he wears a tuxedo and waves his baton, his bands make wonderful music. He is best, however, when he sits beside a child and together, they model and practice, model and practice, model and practice. He slowly builds musical skills and the ability to read and interpret musical scores until children fit into an ensemble of players and then he gives them more difficult pieces to play. He personalizes and perseveres and never quits on the individuals who are his band. He grows musicians through patient and skillful instruction. It is a gift.
“So what?” and “what do you mean by that” are the kinds of questions that cause many children to hunker down behind the child sitting in front of them hoping not to be called on. Lots of hands go up when a teacher asks questions about facts; not so many when the questions require deeper inquiry. A love of intellectual inquiry tolerates children who are reluctant to share and whose sharing contains inaccuracies. Gifted inquirers know that these can be teased out and corrected. It is the chase for understanding and reasoning they pursue. Gifted teachers also know that children can learn in the periphery and listening to how one child sews together a reasoned response helps others with their own. A gifted inquirer will smile and applaud louder for the unexpected yet slowly developed thinking of a reluctant sharer more than for the quick and always on point response of another child. Chasing a well-reasoned and thoughtful response is a gift.
Some children come to school to learn to read, others to play an instrument, and others for the joys of recess and athletics. Every child should have their own “go to” place in school. I smile now thinking of an art teacher whose empathy for children caused him to seek out all children who had not found their school place. He caused them to be artists and then to be proud of their artistry. I remember him in his layers of baggy clothing and Birkenstocks helping a student with charcoal find depth through shading and a student at a potter’s wheel find the feel for drawing a vase out of a lump of clay. It is easier to teach children who have a sense of who they are; it is more difficult to teach children who are lost in themselves. His gift was in turning on the lights within wandering children.
Every child is different with a combination of admirable qualities and some things that cause us to shake our heads. I watched a gifted science teacher who never shook his head because he focused on admirable qualities. His teacher’s affect was as inviting as new snow and his expectations for student learning were as elevated as snow capped mountains. It did not take students long into a new school year to know that his reputation was real. He accepted who they were, found their strengths, and every day helped each child to build their understanding of Biology and AP Biology and computer science. He was never in a hurry but, with his patience, caused all students to engage and learn. Like Mr. Rogers of TV fame, he built students up and, in that building, taught them. It is a gift.
Indelible effects that last a lifetime.
At their 50th reunions, alums invariably share stories about their school experiences and the teachers who taught them. The passage of time has a way of rounding corners and evening out the particulars alums remember. It is difficult to assign causation between a student’s schooling and their life at the age of 70. However, the language and the tones change when alums talk of an exceptional teacher whose insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, or friendship made such an indelible imprint that it lasted 50 or more years. The ability to cause such lifelong effects is a gift.