I try to continue learning at each step of my teaching journey. Although inspired teaching is always my goal, I can manage it only part of the time. I have inspired moments, and sometimes, I have inspired days. In between are extended periods of competence, times of struggle and, I suppose, evidence of blindness. I am delighted and relieved that I have progressed from my original state of ignorance. I am capable of teaching adequately most of the time and fabulously upon occasion. Because I still try to improve, I may be even better tomorrow. The journey from ignorance—mine and others'—to inspiration is the subject of this book.

I am not a researcher, though I read widely and pan for gold in everything I encounter. I see myself as my best research subject. At various stages of my teaching career I can recall how I felt and can identify input that changed me, helping me to think like a teacher. I remember both successes and fiascos. I celebrate hard-earned successes because great moments in teaching are a gift and a source of joy. I try to let go of shame or guilt about the worst moments, knowing I had limited knowledge at the time.

Several great teachers inspired me. Looking back their skills fit the definition of inspired teaching, though the term didn't occur to me at the time. But when I set out to emulate them, I hadn't a clue how to do it. This is the book I wish someone had given to me when I started teaching.

I prepared as all teachers-to-be do; I took the required education courses and earned a teaching certificate. With little classroom experience, I couldn't apply what I was learning. In terms of Bloom's taxonomy, I gained knowledge and some comprehension, but most higher-order thinking was missing. Analyzing situations, applying information effectively, evaluating what I saw or did, synthesizing what I learned—these skills were beyond me when I was a student teacher. Even though some assignments in my education courses required these skills, I answered abstractly and didn't effectively transfer the learning to future situations.

I also felt frustrated in my teaching seminar. The professor assigned unit plans with goals and objectives. Trying to imagine where to begin, I peppered her with questions. How could I write lesson plans when I hadn't even met the students and didn't know what they needed? Looking back, the professor and I were both right. She was trying to impart knowledge about how to plan lessons (covered here in Chapter 2), how to make the classroom productive (Chapter 5), and how to cover material in depth (Chapter 12). I felt I needed to know how to understand the students and the setting (Chapter 7), how to assess what students know (Chapter 8), and how to solve problems I observed (Chapter 3).

Could the professor and I have effectively discussed all six of these areas, and others, simultaneously? It's unlikely. My struggles are not an indictment of my college instructors or my courses. I am sympathetic to the challenge my professor faced as she tried to shape me into a teacher. Until I gained experience, nothing my professors could have said or done would have reached me at the level of deep understanding. I needed context and time to incorporate real-life experiences.

When I was first hired as a high school teacher, teaching four different courses was frustrating. I never had enough time to competently prepare for each of them; sometimes I hardly tried. At the end of the year I went home—fled, really—to start a family.

I thought I was done with teaching, but I maintained my teaching certificate. Later I worked in a community education program for homebound adults who wanted to earn a high school diploma. Despite feeling unsuccessful as a high school teacher, I reasoned that I could successfully teach one person at a time because I wouldn't have to manage group behavior. While teaching in this program and later at a Job Corps center, I encountered a variety of students and life stories that shaped my idea of the typical student. These experiences were the first of many that deepened my understanding of what teaching really means and stimulated me to look at all learners, ages 5 to 95, as more alike than different.

My next major opportunity to grow as a teacher came when I participated in a study team on teaching writing more effectively. A team of 24 teachers spent a week during the summer with facilitators who bombarded us with up-to-date research and best practices. For the next year, we met monthly for day-long workshops with experts on various aspects of teaching in general and teaching writing in particular. My notion of teaching writing became more complex and multifaceted, as I learned the reasons behind various methods and recommendations.

When the study team ended, I was still hungry for more, so I found another way to grow my teaching: a series of effective instruction courses offered by my district's staff development center. One particularly enlightening day I remember thinking that I had no business teaching without knowing this stuff! How had I functioned without it? Not well, but at least I could see myself improving. When a few of us finished the series of four courses and still wanted more, the district responded by offering an independent study for our small group to pursue further information.

Thereafter I worked in the staff development center leading workshops to help others improve their writing instruction. Later I worked in a large high school in our district. I had come back full circle to high school teaching, but now I experienced some success. Besides teaching, I became involved in school improvement efforts and mentored teachers-in-training. Young intern teachers taught me as much as I taught them; the experience constantly enriched my thoughts and actions in the classroom.

As a mentor to intern teachers, I found it hard to explain the reasons for the teaching actions I chose moment by moment. I made choices that were nearly intuitive as I scanned the room to check the attention level of students, paused to rephrase an explanation, glanced at the clock for pacing, or considered how to react to student questions and comments. No matter how many books I read or how many workshops I attended, however, my ability to explain my mental processes was frustratingly limited. Novices did not think about classroom events the way I did—they overlooked things I thought were significant. We also approached planning differently; most beginners thought of just one idea, not a range of possible ideas. Bridging the gap in our thinking processes was hard, and it made me think about how I had learned and changed as a teacher.

One thing that significantly changed my thinking about teaching was peer coaching and scripting. When my peers first scripted my lessons as part of a staff development series, I was amazed at the details they pointed out to me. Colleagues transcribed a whole lesson as I taught, and then we discussed it line by line. My peer coaches named what I was doing at various points and cited what the research suggested about such actions. Soon my teaching choices, previously motivated by "educated guesses" stemming from a shallow mix of education and experience, became known techniques I could use at will. Even better, I saw my specific strengths and weaknesses all folded into the same performance. At last I could begin to tease apart the various aspects of my own teaching performance to discern effective practices.

I began scripting the student teachers' lessons to point out the implications of their teaching choices and actions. To my surprise, scripting others accelerated my own understanding. The effects of different teaching decisions became clearer to me. I learned to pay more attention to student learning, not merely teacher presentations.

Later in my career I heard about the National Board Certification process. The idea of measuring myself against an objective standard to find out if I was really a good teacher appealed to me. I signed up for the certification process and worked harder than I could have imagined. Never had I been asked to look so carefully at every detail in my assignments or presentations, or to ponder and analyze the various results, or lack of results, that my teaching produced with learners. The certification process pushed me to a new level of consciousness. To perform well was not enough; I had to evaluate the effect each choice had on learners, not generally, but in specific gains that I could reasonably credit to my teaching. Once again I developed new awareness and was more capable of excellent teaching. My certification took two years to complete, but the effort was more than worth it. The experience increased my ability to reflect upon my own efforts to effectively instruct students.

A National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) validity study (Bond, Smith, Baker, & Hattie, 2000) provided me with a framework to understand excellent teaching. Based on the study's identification of 13 research-based criteria and related measures, I began focusing on separate teaching skills and how to identify growth—in other words, better performance—in each one. The more clearly I understood each skill, the better I assisted the developing teachers with whom I worked.

Looking back on my own growth, I agree that experts redefine problems and "reach ingenious and insightful solutions that somehow do not occur to others" (Sternberg & Horvath as cited in Bond et al., 2000, p. 41). I am aware of the pitiful lack of problem-solving skills I displayed as a first-year teacher. The data other writers and presenters shared, and more important, the thought-provoking and revealing questions they asked, triggered a rearrangement of the ways I thought about teaching. Over time, as my knowledge expanded, I witnessed myself using skills that would have been impossible when I was a beginner; the growth and its results felt terrific. Better, the fact that I could create assignments and settings where students learned more was delightful and deeply satisfying to me. I invite readers to join me in an ongoing journey toward teacher self-improvement.

For Information and Inspiration