In this post I want to consider how we would identify what a great teacher is. I guess the easy answer is the one that gets the grades and in UK schools, it’s all about getting the grades but there’s a lot more to being a great teacher.
If we all think back to who our favourite teachers were, it would be rare to find the reason to be that they got me great grades as a standalone. Great teachers DO get great grades for their students but it’s not because they encourage them to constantly revise nor do they present them with practice test after practice test.
Great teachers have a bank of characteristics that enable them to help their students achieve success and it is the combination of these rather than a single attribute that singles them out.
My choice for a great teacher would be my secondary school chemistry teacher, Don Roberts. Year after year his students achieved marks of 100% or close to that, regularly causing him to be investigated by the then Oxbridge examination board. No, he didn’t give us the questions before the exam and no, he didn’t correct them before they were submitted. Instead he encouraged a love of his subject through making it exciting, relevant and rigorous. When it came to the exam, few of us even needed to open our textbooks to revise; we could all remember each experiment (he taught mainly through practicals) and, even today, decades later, I can still picture the production of copper sulphate with copper oxide and sulphuric acid and how potassium chromate was converted to potassium dichromate with spectacular results. It wasn’t just the quality of his lessons – he spent time at lunchtime and after school, with those who were interested (the vast majority) to encourage a love of chemistry. Many took A level chemistry at the same time as their O level, such was their understanding of the subject.
We had a huge amount of respect for him as a teacher and as a person in his own right. It wasn’t until after I left the school that I found out he would organise fishing trips for his students at the weekend and started a campanology club which was wildly popular too as it played the popular music of the time.
We all wanted to do well to repay him for his care, attention and love for his students and the outcome were great grades for us.
We all know that the answer given to why teachers’ salaries are so low is that we don’t do it for the money; it’s a vocation, and Don Roberts proved that to be the case. The great teachers today, the best teachers, are those who are dedicated to the success of their students. They are usually mavericks and usually only tolerated because of their success whereas they should be celebrated. They don’t fit the mould of what the powers that be say are great teachers but I’d rather have one of them for every ten who grind out results wi9th their students and who treat teaching as a production line rather than one of the most important vocations in the world.
