How Great Teachers Start The Year

What’s the secret to a great beginning?  It helps if you’re ready to start.  Great teachers invariably are.

(I can hear some of you non-teachers muttering now: Who wouldn’t be ready to start after a six-week break?)

Why are great teachers ready and eager to get started?  Because they’ve been separated from their natural element – the company of young people seeing the world in new ways – for long enough.   They’re ready to get back in harness, to regain the rhythm of the classroom, to nudge their new crop of students from entropy to focused engagement, from apathy to passion, from unbridled energy to purposeful achievement.   This is what they do and, like thoroughbreds, great teachers prefer the race to the pasture.

Great teachers realise how much is at stake in their classrooms and see themselves as doing society’s most critical job.   Armed with white chalk and a red pen, they are the warriors in the battle against poverty, crime and wasted talent.  While anyone would be rightly appalled to learn that male high school dropouts are 47 times more likely to end up in prison than college graduates, it is great teachers who lead the charge and make the biggest difference.

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance,” says the former president of Harvard, Derek Bok.   Great teachers agree, though they would argue that their services are hardly “expensive” -- if their modest pay cheques are anything to go by.

So, great teachers are raring to go and highly motivated.  That helps, but it’s what they do next that really matters.

Great teachers have unflinchingly high expectations and they make these expectations abundantly clear, especially in their first few classes.  Like sea captains briefing their crews on the challenging voyage ahead, great teachers help students see that smooth seas do not make skilful sailors, and that certain routines must be observed for ship to stay on course.  

It’s said that journalists should “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”  An ordinary teacher is able to comfort students, but a great teacher has mastered the art of strategic affliction.   Complacency provokes them; they declare open season on smug students, both the ones who wish to appear afflicted and the comfortable who affect indifference, subjecting their prey to a campaign of goading and cajoling. 

Great teachers make excuses for nobody; they receive excuses with minimal indulgence.   They praise effort, not ability.

Great teachers know what they don’t know.  They’re aware that the most important teachers in a student’s life have been, and will continue to be, their parents or guardians.  So, great teachers seek out parents and guardians early on.  They call; they email; they communicate. 

Like a detective pursing a suspect, great teachers close in on their quarries by asking questions to reach their core concern: What is going to work with this student?

Great teachers are often impatient and easily bored, most often by their own teaching.   So they are constantly trying out new hooks and links, dropping the dated analogies they deployed to engage pupils of a few years ago.   Which is more likely to register now: a reference to Rowling’s wizards or a nod to Meyer’s vampires?   What is to be mined -- besides the precious mineral “unobtainium” – from the world of James Cameron’s epic science fiction film, Avatar?  

Great teachers always ask: What will help me connect to the world of my students?    

What’s in the learning of a student’s name?  Quite a bit, if you understand, as great teachers do, that mastering each student’s name, as soon as possible, is the crucial first step in building participation and community in the classroom.   Few moments are more awkward than calling on a student whose name you’ve forgotten.

What’s left to distinguish great teachers at the start of the school year?  In a word: planning.  Jaime Escalante, the meticulous master of Mathematics and one of the greatest teachers to grace a classroom, prepared each quiz, homework assignment and practice session before the school year even began.  This allowed him to focus on exciting interest and playing to the personalities and chemistry of a particular class.

As they put their plans into play, great teachers constantly gauge their students’ learning.   In his soon-to-be-published book, Teaching As Leadership, author Steven Farr points out that great teachers don’t ask: “Does anyone have any questions?”  Farr says this is a classic rookie mistake: students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

So great teachers are constantly asking: Are my students -- all of my students – following what I am saying?  They constantly check for understanding.  They realize that a strong start is sustained by a willingness to explain again, to start over whenever the need arises.   

Andrew Taylor is the Principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana.  His email address is: principal.map@gmail.com.  Maru-a-Pula’s website is: www.maruapula.org