Quality Teacher

“I’ve learned that people will forget what your said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you make them feel.”

Maya Angelou

As a child I remember sitting in my desk in my fourth grade classroom trying to make myself smaller.  My thinking was if I was smaller I would become invisible to the teacher and that meant she couldn’t single me out to go to the board to work out a math problem.  Going to the board was a public humiliation.  Her words, “it’s wrong” echoed in my childhood memory for a long time.   The feeling of being inferior, not capable and dumb stayed with me all through school.  Imagine how different I might have felt if my teacher had used the board as a place to make mistakes and ultimately discover the answer.

How you feel determines your success or failure, satisfaction or discontent, feeling competent or stupid.   Each one of us has a need to feel capable in what we do and to be loved and valued.  In the elaborate net of life the single underlying thread in our shared humanity is the potential for kindness in every encounter. 

Teachers can create a quality environment for their students, and the first element of quality is practicing kindness.   A quality teacher must ask: “is what I am about to do, stand a reasonable chance of strengthening this relationship.”

The elements of a quality teacher are:

1.     Who you are.  Your students are eager to know about you, let your self-shine though for them.

2.     What you stand for and why you stand for it, are of endless interest to your students.  Discussions big and small with people who they respect create ideas in the minds of students as they begin to form opinions. 

3.     What you will ask them to do.  Make sure your students know what you will ask them to do.  Never surprise them.

4.     What you won’t ask them to do.  Setting this expectation gives students freedom in their choices.

5.     What you will do for them.  As long as they make an effort to learn, you will help them in any way you can.  Discussions will be encouraged; disagreement will be laid on the table and explained or changed.

6.     What you will not do for them.  You will not do their work, or tell them what to do if you believe they can figure the answer out for themselves.  You will spend a lot of time teaching them how to evaluate their own work and to defend their evaluations. 

To be successful in life, we must evaluate ourselves and work to improve; we cannot and should not depend on others to do this for us.   Students treasure a quality teacher because a quality teacher makes them feel valued, competent and capable.