A favorite college professor of mine, Dr. Gary Albright, used to challenge his students with the statement, “If you can’t explain it, you don’t know it.” Every claim his students made had to be explained. No statement ever went uncontested by Dr. Albright. I have used this technique throughout my teaching career. Whether it be challenging answers to math problems or statements about world peace, I have followed this same method of making students explain their answers. Explain it to me so I know you understand. This is a simple and powerful technique for increasing student understanding of what they know and don’t know. But is this comprehension test the key to being a good teacher? It is not. Although Dr. Albright was a brilliant leader of socratic seminars, he could be devastating for students who were not prepared for his assaults. If you were unprepared or just did not understand, he would dismiss you and command you to leave the class until you had an answer. Some students never returned. There is more to being a good teacher than intelligence and one successful teaching method.

For the past fifty years I have been searching for those key attributes that make a good teacher. I have not discovered a silver bullet or holy grail answer. What I have discovered is that teaching is an art. Like all art, the more the artist masters the medium, the better the artist will be. With effort and determination one can become a good artist, or a good teacher. It takes a whole other combination of qualities to become great. 

This distinction between good and great became abundantly clear to me when I had the opportunity to work with the chefs at Jeremiah Tower’s Star’s Restaurant. The executive chefs were able to create amazing original recipes every day using only the freshest ingredients they purchased each morning. I was not even in the same class as the sous chefs at Star’s. The sous chefs were amazing. The talents of the executive chefs were beyond my dreams.  

I got to know the owners and employees of Star’s Restaurant because I once owned a recreational resort where we cooked BBQ meals and provided entertainment. Star’s had its employees’ parties there for many years. I once asked executive chef Mark Franz why they kept coming back each year. He told me our food was good, our entertainment was good, and our prices were good. That perfectly fit what they wanted. It made me realize that, sometimes, being good can be great. I have always aspired to be a good teacher, even a great teacher. Every day is a new adventure and a new challenge to be a better teacher.

My lifelong quest to be a good teacher led me to read many books and articles about education. An article recently posted in Edutopia, How to Engage Students in Any Subject Area by Esther Wojcicki rang true to me. It lists and explains four attributes of effective classrooms. I am going to use Ms. Wojcicki’s four attributes as a foundation to explain in my own words what each one means to me.

1. There’s a culture of caring and kindness within the class.

Letting your students know you care about them is essential. Without this connection, students will never feel fully vested in the class.

 I do a few simple things to let students know I care. The first is greeting each student by name. I walk around the room and make eye contact with each student. Just saying their names and making some quick remarks or asking a question makes students feel I care about each of them as individuals.

Another thing I do is an assignment called Monday Feedback. There are three questions; “What did you like?”, “What did you not like or not understand?”, and “What random question or thought do you have?. I respond to each student. This personalizes our relationship. It makes students feel more connected and gives me insights into each student. This assignment is time consuming for me, but the feedback makes the effort worthwhile.

Student teams give students the opportunity to really get to know at least some of their classmates. It takes practice to make teams work well. Done well, teams build a strong comradery among teammates. Showing teammates how to support and help each other raises the level of learning for everyone. Teams also give me an opportunity to talk with small groups in a more personalized setting.

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2. Students know why they’re studying the subject.

There is so much material to cover in social studies. There will never be enough time to cover all of it. Long ago I decided to focus on skills instead of content. I focus on three main skills, research, synthesizing and creating.

Research must go beyond assigned readings or DBQ’s. According to The X Files “The truth is out there.” But how does one find the truth? How does one distinguish between truth and falsehood? How does one find quality vetted sources? How does one separate the wheat from the chaff? Research must be a treasure hunt that enables students to use the most obscure clues to find the gold.

I have always been an advocate for Bloom’s Taxonomy, but Bloom’s does not include research. It does not address the acquisition of information. It just assumes the information is there. In today’s world the acquisition of information is huge. So many jobs focus on this one skill. Throw away the textbooks. Bring out the essential questions and begin the research.

The essential questions are the key to students understanding why they are learning a topic. Look at all the potential content, the current hot topics in the world, and select content that will spark students interest. Work with students to find interesting essential questions. Students love learning content that is both mind blowing and new to them. Seek out those topics. For example in past years we have asked, “How did America get itself so deeply involved in the War in Vietnam?” This year, during the research phase, I could see this topic was not fully engaging the students. We switched focus to “Was Daniel Ellsberg justified in publishing the Pentagon Papers?” They got hooked on this one and went with it.

If you cannot at least explain to students why they should be learning a topic, why the topic is important, move onto something else. There are plenty of topics that can be chosen to teach the lifelong learning skills that will enable students to learn everything they need to know for the rest of their lives.

The final phase is creating, or making it their own. Whether it is an essay, a video presentation, a discussion, or an artistic expression, students must create something to both show understanding and to make it their own. This is the step that adds to and enhances their world view. For example, how a student feels about gun control is not as important as is their understanding of the arguments pro and con. If students come to conclusions based on solid clams, with strong evidence, we have done our job.

3. There’s a student-friendly revision policy.

Way back in the day I taught 6th grade. I returned an essay to a student replete with notes written by me with my trusty red pen. He looked at the grade and dropped the essay in the garbage can. That incident made me realize I was doing something wrong. From that point on student essays were written, corrected and graded, rewritten on unlined paper, regraded, and bound into a book of student work to be presented to parents at the end of the year. The quality of the work improved, student engagement improved, and there was no more ignoring my notes.

From that time to the present I have always allowed students to revise their work. Most student work is categorized as formative assessment. There are built in opportunities for self correcting or peer correcting before I see the assignments. I am rarely asked by a student for an opportunity to revise one of these assignments after I grade it. 

I only give two or three summative assessment projects each quarter. The students know the value of these assignments and really want to do well on them. They ask questions. They ask their classmates and me to review their written work. If the final product does not meet expectations, students generally ask for permission to revise their work. For students who need to make revisions, this is where the real learning takes place. All summative assessments are submitted to TurnItIn, so plagiarism is not a problem.

4. Embed collaboration in most of the assignments 

Students must learn to work together and to help each other. This is always a challenge at the beginning of the year. Most students are used to working alone, sitting in rows with interpersonal contact discouraged.

There are many ways to encourage collaboration. For example, if I give a team worksheet with 10 questions, I will only grade three answers. Team members must work together or risk bad grades. Other times I randomly quiz students on the answers. No one wants to not be able to provide the correct answers. Research can be done as a team with each teammate finding three or four good sources. Peer pressure is a wonderful way to motivate students. Once the teacher gets teams working together, little oversight is needed. 

Jigsaw projects necessitate collaboration to get the pieces of the puzzle correctly placed together. Large topics are broken up into smaller topics. Each team gets a topic. Each student gets a piece of that topic. Through sharing, first with the teams and then with the whole class, everyone gets to learn from each other. The final piece of the project is designed so everyone can demonstrate what they have learned.

Students enjoy sharing their learning with their teammates. They enjoy talking to each other. Once the parameters are established the power of teaming becomes self-evident.

Students never seem to tire of telling what they have learned. I have so often been told about great ideas and interesting facts students have discovered for themselves. Sometimes these are the same materials I put in a lecture a day or two before. Being told never has the impression of discovering something on their own. Teaming gives a ready audience for discovery and multiplies the material being discovered.

These four attributes are just a place to begin, a foundation to build on. Teaching is as individual as each of us. We all have different knowledge, different skill sets, and different personalities. Whatever we bring to the classroom, students should leave with a feeling of accomplishment. If you can make students feel like they are really learning something and feel proud of themselves, you have done your job.