Qualities of 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 experts 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. 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. Good Teachers Take Risks. Good teachers 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. Good Teachers Have a Positive Attitude. I don't much like being around people who are cynical about their work, who complain about students or student writing or student-athletes or fellow teachers or administrators or trustees or teaching loads or salaries. I occasionally succumb to cynicism myself, but I find that I don't much like myself when I am waxing cynical, and I try to unwax myself. I like humor, but not when it is directed against others. I distrust whiners who put themselves into the role of victims. "How can we do anything with the students the admissions office is sending us these days?" "My goodness, I've never had such a hopeless set of students." "Don't the high schools teach them anything anymore?" "How do they expect us to teach these kids at 8 a.m.? All they do is sleep after partying all night." "This profession surely isn't what it used to be. Why, I remember--" Casting ourselves in victims' roles gets us off the hook, but we teachers ought to enjoy being on the hook. We ought to enjoy, not eternally complain about, the challenges students give us. Why do we think we deserve smart, self-motivated, hard-working, wide-awake students-students who do not really need to be taught? Why do we think we deserve not to be challenged? I do not always succeed in being positive about my students or my job, but when I feel the need to scratch my cynical itch, I remind myself that the teachers I admire the more are sometimes frustrated, usually underpaid, always overworked, but rarely cynical or negative, and then almost never about students. 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. Good Teachers Think of Teaching as a Form of Parenting. No one likes to think of college teaching as in loco parentis, but the best teachers I know seem to find that their best teaching feels a lot like parenting. By that they do not mean that as teachers they set curfews or lock the dorms up at 11 p.m. or take away television privileges for students who get below a C or confiscate X-rated videos or Jack Daniels. It does not mean that they offer sex education (though they will, if a student trusts them enough to ask), and it does not mean that they offer spiritual instruction (unless a student asks them to). But good teachers seem to find that the caring that goes into their teaching feels a lot like the caring that goes into parenting. It means knowing when to stand firm on a deadline or a standard of excellence, and when to bend or apologize. It means knowing when to give students someone to talk with, when to be the rock that students can test themselves by trying to move out of the way, when to protect students from the ugly evils of the world, and when to let them face those evils in all of their ugliness. It means knowing the difference between soft caring and tough caring. It means recognizing that students are adults, sort of, but children, sort of. Looking back, I know that as a student I found several father and mother figures among my teachers. And now, at a time in my life when all four of my own children are in graduate school, I know that they are finding replacement parents out there, teachers who are continuing and in some ways correcting the job my wife and I did as parents. But mostly I know that I feel especially comfortable with college students these days. Having just come away from years of parenting young people very much like the ones I see in my classrooms, I feel that I know them, their insecurities, their problems, their capacities. I feel that I have a reasonably sure instinct about when to stand firm and when to bend, when to be someone to talk with and when to say "Well, see you in class tomorrow" and when to say "Got time for a coffee?" Actually, it feels a lot like love. Good Teachers Try to Give Students Confidence. I have come to the conclusion that the specific subject matter I teach is less important for itself than for what students learn by learning it. My Chaucer students can for the most part get along in life just fine without knowing much about Chaucer's language or the Canterbury Tales or why the low-class Miller feels free enough to tell a raunchy tale in reply to the tale of the high-class Knight. My Chaucer students cannot get along, however, without the confidence they gain by mastering a new language, learning to understand what social classes were in Chaucer's time, and why a miller would, in the carnival atmosphere of pilgrimage, feel enough courage to joust verbally with a knight. When students write papers, it is far less important that they say something worth reading about the Wife of Bath's fifth husband than that they develop the confidence to know that, when they really do have something important to say, they will be able to say it clearly, forcefully, and with a proper marshaling of evidence. Allen, one of my best students in 1995, did well on tests and papers, but refused to speak in class. In a conference I asked him why, since he was doing so well, he would not contribute to the classroom discussion. "I guess it kind of scares me," he replied, "with all of those really smart students in there saying intelligent things. I learn more if I just listen." I understood, of course, because I gave similar excuses when I was an undergraduate. Like Allen, I counted on hard work and good test and paper grades to pull me through, but I never talked in class. I told Allen he was as smart and as articulate as anyone in the class, and I hoped he would feel comfortable sharing his ideas with the rest of us. I told him that the most of those other students looked and sounded smart in part because I tried always to find something in what they said to praise, because I had tried to develop a knack for creatively rephrasing what they said so they sounded smart, and that if necessary I would do the same for his comments. Shortly after that, he did, once, offer a comment in class, and I said something encouraging about it. But then he clammed up again for the rest of the semester. About a week after the last class, Allen came in and asked if I would write letters of recommendation for him for his applications to law school. I said I would, of course, but when I found out about his desire to be a lawyer, I knew I should have pressed him even harder to be more aggressive in class. How much of a future is there, after all, for a smart lawyer who does well on tests but is afraid to speak his mind in front of others? Allen will do all right, of course, and he will gain the confidence he needs to succeed in his profession, but I wish I had pushed him harder while I had the chance to force him to feel the confidence he has every right to feel. I think I should have tried harder to knock him off balance. 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. Good Teachers Try to Motivate Students by Working Within Their Incentive System. Most undergraduate students of my generation-at least the ones at Earlham College, where I took my bachelor's degree-were eager to serve their fellow humans. Most of the undergraduates I encounter these days, on the other hand, are eager to make a lot of money. Some humanities teachers complain about the crassness of these students. Others try to figure out ways to use their students' desire for financial security to motivate them. They point out that many business executives were liberal arts majors in college, and that while a good liberal arts background does not always help college graduates get their first jobs in business and industry, once they have that first job they tend to advance more rapidly than graduates with more narrowly technical degrees. They point out that liberal arts graduates know how to synthesize things, how to explain things to others, how to persuade others to their point of view, how to understand the people who many any business work. In English departments, I sometimes point out, we teach students all sorts of money-making skills, like reading and analysis, speaking and writing, picking up ideas quickly, critical thinking, psychology, pedagogy, pattern-finding, drawing conclusions from evidence, persuasion, and so on. We also encourage students to think about why they are on earth, about where they are going, about what some of the greatest thinkers and most creative writers in the past have said about the meaning of human existence, about what is most worth doing in life, and about how wealthy people might best spend their hard-earned money. Good teachers do not complain about how crass the students are these days. They try to understand what makes students tick these days, and then they build on that knowledge to make them tock. 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. Good Teachers Listen to Their Students. Shortly after I read Professor Levi's statement that no one has ever defined what makes a good teacher, I asked the students in my undergraduate Chaucer course at Baylor University (where I was a visiting professor during 1995-96), to write a sentence or two about what, in their own experience, makes a good teacher. The responses ranged widely, but I sorted through the pieces of paper on which they wrote them and put them in different piles. Then I combined the piles into ones that seemed to be generically related. Then I combined the piles into ones that seemed to be generically related. Three quarters of their responses fell into two piles. The first of those I call the "A" pile, the second I call the "E" pile. In the "A" pile I found words like "accessible," "available," and "approachable." Here are some of the sentences they wrote in response to my question, "What makes a good teacher?" I have edited them slightly, mostly to put them into more parallel constructions: Good teachers: are available to assist students with questions on the subject, and they show concern. do not have a lofty, standoffish attitude. can interact with a student on an individual basis. want to know each individual student. give time, effort, and attention to their students. are personable, on your side. are willing to be a friend to students. are actually interested in the students. are actively involved with their students. are first friends, then educators. The friend encourages, supports, and understands; the educator teaches, challenges, and spurs the student on.