Category Archives: Best Practices

Articles that gives ideas or suggestions for best teaching practices.

What Makes a Great Teacher? Chris Lehmann Shares His Thoughts

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When I established this blog, my intention was to recognize and celebrate great teachers. There are many loyal readers of this blog who are, I am sure, interested in the stories about these talented and gifted educators. But I am aware that, more than anything, classroom teachers want to know how they themselves can improve their practice, and so today I would like to share with you an article that I stumbled across on the internet yesterday. The article was written by Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. He wrote this article a few years ago when he was a teacher at Beacon School, a progressive public high school in Manhattan. Here is Lehmann’s answer to the question What makes a great teacher?
lehman_chris_promopic[1]What Makes a Great Teacher?
by Chris Lehmann
What makes a great teacher? Sort of an important question, right? I’ve seen teachers who worked for hours on their lessons, who were scholars in the field fail miserably, and I’ve seen teachers who, if you give them five minutes before they walked in to glance over their material, they could run a class for an hour on any topic under the sun. In the end, what makes a great teacher? I wish I had a magic eight-ball that allowed me to figure this one out, but it’s something I’ve really given a lot of thought to… and I think what follows are at least some interesting ways to think about the profession. So what makes a great teacher?

1) Passion for teaching. This can manifest itself so many ways. I’m the “jump around the room” kind of teacher, and sure, that comes from a lot of passion, but some of the best teachers I’ve known have had a passion that students had to be quiet to catch onto.

2) Love of kids. You laugh, but it’s true! I’ve seen people come in and talk about teaching and talk about how much they love their subject and know about their subject, but they never mention the kids. Worse, we had an interview once where the teacher clearly knew his stuff, but he basically admitted that his classroom management style was fear and intimidation. Not who I want teaching kids I care about.

3) Love of their subject. Again… pretty important. I spent four years dropping by Mike Thayer’s classroom because to watch him explain physics or calculus was, for me, to understand how you could have a passion for something that was always a mystery for me. Great teachers not only love their subject, but they love to share that joy with students.

4) Understanding of the role of a school in a child’s life. High school is more than the sum of the classes the kids take. It’s a time to grow, explore, try on identities, find joys that might just last a lifetime. Sometimes the best teaching we do happens on basketball courts, in the halls after a class, at a local coffee shop or in a drama studio. The best teachers know that they are teachers for much more than the time they are in the physical classroom.

5) A willingness to change. This one gets overlooked sometimes, I think. I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. We talk about how schools should be transformative for kids, but I think they can be just as transformative for teachers. If you expect kids to be changed by their interaction with you, it’s got to be a two-way street.

6) A work ethic that doesn’t quit. It’s a hard, draining job that will demand all that you can give sometimes. You’ve got to be able to have some balance in your life, but there are very few teachers who can be effective by cramming everything they need to do into the hours allocated by the average teacher’s contract. (And for the record, the overwhelming majority of the teachers I’ve met put in hours well above and beyond the contract.)

7) A willingness to reflect. You’ve got to be able to ask why things went the way they did… both on the good and the bad days. And you have to be able to admit when the reasons it went bad were because of what you did, not what the students did. (Equally important is the understanding that often things go right because of what the kids brought to the table, not because your lesson plan should be bronzed.) Teaching requires a willingness to cast a critical eye on your practice, your pedagogy and your self. And it can be brutal.

8) Organization. My personal Achilles heel, and one of the things I’m always working to improve. My Palm Pilot helped, really. But I hate paperwork and official looking documents, and it kills me. I am amazed at the people like Dale Lally who seem to get his papers handed back before the kids hand them in or seems to be able to put his hands on every unit he’s ever taught within a moment’s notice. Kids know what to expect, they know he’s going to be organized and have a structure to his class… and he’s still creative and spontaneous and interesting. I can only imagine how much better of a teacher I’d be if the structure of everything I did was just a little more organized.

9) Understanding that being a “great teacher” is a constant struggle to always improve. I think I’ve had some moments of great teaching in my career, but I also still see all the holes in my teaching — sadly, often times mirroring holes in my self — and I still want to get better… because I think I’ve got a long way to go to be a great teacher every day. And even if I get better at everything I see as weaknesses now, I can only imagine what new challenges will face me on that day.

10) Enough ego to survive the hard days. The tough days will leave you curled up under a desk, convinced that you can’t teach or the world is too hard for these kids or the work is too much or whatever the problem was that day… you have to have enough sense of self to survive those days.

11) Enough humility to remember it’s not about you. It’s about the kids. If your ego rules your classroom, if the class turns into “me vs. them” or if you can’t understand that a sixteen year old might be able to tell you something you don’t know, then don’t teach. Or at least, don’t teach high school.

12) A willingness to work collaboratively. Sure, there are some great teachers who close the door to their classroom and do what they want, but I think you send a strange message to the kids that way sometimes. Teachers are part of a school community, and even where that community can be flawed (and lots of schools are), a great teacher should be willing to work to make the community a better place.

Anne Sullivan Macy: The Strategies She Used to Achieve Helen Keller’s Miracle

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$RDT5O7NAlmost everyone has heard of Anne Sullivan Macy, the remarkable teacher who worked with Helen Keller, an extremely intelligent blind and deaf child from Tuscumbia, Alabama. The relationship between the teacher and the student is explored in The Miracle Worker by William Gibson, an iconic piece of American literature that is frequently taught in public schools. This award-winning play depicts the exact moment at which, due to Anne’s expert instructional efforts, Helen was able to grasp the concept of language. This knowledge unlocked a world of isolation for the little girl, allowing her to connect with her fellow human beings, and making it possible for her to earn a university degree at a time when educating women was rare. The scene is sweet. But what strategies, exactly, did the miracle-working teacher use in order to achieve this breakthrough? After extensive reading on the subject, I think I may be able to identify a few of them.

First of all, Anne read every bit of published material available in her day about the education of handicapped students. Knowledge of pedagogy is the first step to effective practice. In addition to this, Anne had the “advantage” of personal experience, as she herself had wrestled with severe vision impairment as a result of trachoma. I’m sure at one time or another, we’ve all met an educator who is particularly effective at working with students who are facing the same challenges the teacher himself faced as a youngster.

Second, Anne was a keen observer, and she made it a point to watch the normal processes of language acquisition. She then replicated those processes as best she could to fit the particular circumstances and needs of her student. Today, we would probably call this strategy recognizing brain-based learning, and coordinating teaching strategies to fit the way the brain naturally learns. Also, experts generally agree that much of Anne’s success in teaching Helen language was attributed to the fact that the teacher always communicated to her student with complete sentences. Concrete nouns such as water or spoon, verbs such was pump or run, or adjectives such as hot or smooth,  may be easy to convey. But abstract ideas such as beauty or truth, or certain parts of speech such as pronouns and some prepositions are much more difficult to impart to an individual unable to see or hear.

Third, Anne was especially adept at incorporating experiential learning into her lesson plans. The effectiveness of “learning by doing” has been well documented, but in a day and age when most instruction consisted of rote memorization without necessarily comprehending, Anne’s insistence on teaching through constructed experience was truly innovative. Wading through the creek water, climbing the tree, holding the chick as it hatched from the egg—experiences like these were the staples of Anne’s instructional program.

I have included an abbreviated but concise biography of this amazing teacher in my book, Chalkboard Champions, which can also be found at amazon.com at the following link: Chalkboard Champions.

Strong School Library Programs Increase Standardized Test Scores

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Most chalkboard champions agree that library programs are extremely valuable to students. But did you know that, according to recent studies, strong school libraries help to increase standardized test scores? Statistics show that public schools with strong school library programs outperform those without such programs on high-stakes standardized tests. This is true regardless of the school community’s parent education, poverty levels, ethnicity, or the percentage of English language learners in the school population. Increases in library program elements correspond to standardized test scores at all grade levels: elementary, middle school, and high school.

Library elements that contribute to increased test scores include the total number of hours the library is open, the total amount of technology available from the library, the total services provided by trained library staff, the presence of a program of curriculum-integrated information with literacy instruction, the informal instruction of students in the use of resources, providing teachers with information about new resources, and providing reference assistance to both teachers and students.

A strong school library program in described as one that provides a full-time teacher/librarian, a full-time paraprofessional, a robust and up-to-date collection of digital, print, and media resources with a budget to support it, and abundant access to the library’s facilities, technology, and resources. How well does your school’s library program meet the criteria?

The Rebound Effect: Positivity Generates Positivity

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TeacherAppleTN1[1]Every Chalkboard Champion knows that positivity in the classroom generates positivity in return. Here’s a tangible example of that which I learned one year, quite by accident.

You know how at the beginning of every year we are asked to complete a form that lists our goals for the year? Well, one year I decided that my goal was to make a sincere effort to be better at praising my students. I wanted to create a more positive relationship with my kids and a more congenial classroom environment. In addition, my principal was impressing upon the staff the need to foster better communication with parents. I decided I would combine the two goals, and so, on my form, I wrote that each month I would write six letters to parents praising their child. As a junior high school teacher with six classes of 42 students each, I reasoned that it shouldn’t be difficult to find one kid from each class each month that I could say something good about.

And so for the entire year, at the end of every month, I selected my six students and wrote each one a praise letter on decorative stationery. I read each letter aloud to the student before I put it in the envelope and sealed it, and then I gave it to the kid to take home to their parents. I shared the notes with the students to lower their anxiety level—a letter from the teacher is rarely good news—and to ensure that the note would really get delivered. But I could just as easily have put some postage on the letters and sent them through the U.S. mail.

The response I received from the parents was overwhelming. Many of the parents wrote notes back to me, expressing messages about how much they appreciated receiving praise about their child, how much their child enjoyed my class, or how pleased they were that I was their child’s teacher. Imagine my surprise when I realised that I was receiving praise letters like the ones that I was sending! I saved these notes, partly because they were so uplifting, and partly as proof that I had met the goals I had set for myself for the year. In May, I presented them to my principal at my annual evaluation conference. My principal suggested I photocopy the notes and take them to the District Office to be placed in my personnel file there, so I did.
And here is how those letters further rebounded positivity back to me. A couple of years later I applied for a transfer to a new school that was opening up in my district. I was thrilled when I was selected for the position. Imagine my surprise when, later, my new principal told me that he had read those letters in my personnel file, and it was partly because of them that he decided to hire me!

Be the Chalkboard Champion of Your Own Book!

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chalkboard2[1]When I became a teacher 32 years ago, I started keeping a collection of items that marked my activities and successes in the classroom. I kept the sweet little notes from students and the praise letters from their parents, the thank you cards from colleagues and the district office for the extra services I performed, photographs of special projects or activities we worked on, the newspaper clippings about the programs I initiated, the evaluation forms I was especially proud of, and any awards I received.
I just kept these things in a file folder until, a few years later, when I became a scrapbooking enthusiast, I decided to transfer them all to a simple scrapbook. I arranged the items in chronological order, mounted some of them on school-themed scrapbook paper, and placed them in clear plastic page protectors. I also combed through old school yearbooks to photocopy published pictures of me at work in the classroom, on field trips with the kids, or chaperoning various school events. When the scrapbook was completed, I realized that what lay before me was a record of many classroom successes and an archive of my professional achievements.

Personally, I found my book to be a great source of solace during those periods of my career when I questioned whether or not I had made a serious vocational error! Also, I think it will make a nice table display when I eventually retire. But seriously, a book like this can become a valuable tool whenever you need to make a list of your accomplishments; if you’re looking for a new job or applying for that summer institute, for instance. Think about creating one for yourself. You can be the Chalkboard Champion of your own book!