What do great teachers have in common? To find out, education consultant Connie Muther observed and interviewed more than 60 teachers who are highly regarded by their colleagues and students. These teachers, she found, share three qualities. First, they love teaching, the content they teach, and their students. Second, they are unique. They bring their personal experiences, hobbies, and interests into their teaching. "The more wonderful the teacher, the more weird they are," Muther said. Third, great teachers have a mission or passion. For many of them, their passion comes out of pain: they want to protect students from the pain they themselves suffered. As a group, great teachers dislike colleagues who complain (especially about students), and they regret not being able to share their ideas more with peers. Advice from this group of teachers to other educators, Muther added, boils down to this: "If you don't love kids, get out!"
Kentucky's Commissioner of Education, Thomas Boysen, shared the lessons of statewide reform with his general session audience. The first lesson, he said, is that "there can be no excellence or equality of opportunity without a systemic approach. We need standards for student performance, and we need opportunity-to-learn standards," he asserted. Standards and assessment are especially important, because "many of us who work in curriculum and instruction have been soft on standards and light on assessment."
"We have got to have clear standards, partly to engage parents," Boysen said. "Standards and assessment are vital for the public support that we need." Imagine basketball games if the players ran up and down the floor but no one kept score, he said. "I think we'd have a lot less interest. And we have to be aware that two-thirds of the people who pay the bill for public education do not have children in school. . . . With standards and assessment, we have a scorecard."
Schools need a new kind of leadership based on moral authority, Thomas Sergiovanni of Trinity University told his overflow audience. Rather than "follow-me" leadership based on job-role authority or "bartering" between the leader and staff, educators should seek leadership that compels from within, based on widely shared values and ideas, he argued.
People who join an organization such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving believe in the principles that underlie the group's work, Sergiovanni explained. The members follow the ideas the group represents rather than just following the group's leader. Commitment to ideas makes people more self-managing, he said, making leadership less necessary.
To develop that level of commitment, schools need to become communities with shared ideas and beliefs, where "the decisions people make embody the values we share," Sergiovanni said. In such a climate, collegiality takes on a moral overtone, as a commitment to help one another. Mere "teamwork" is trivial by comparison.
Are we raising a nation of "watchers"? The thought worries Jane Healy, author of Endangered Minds. Visual technologies, such as TV, computers, video games, and the like, can have a negative effect on children's growing brains, she believes. Although these technologies can foster some visual and spatial intelligences, they do not necessarily support the development of children's reflective and analytic thinking abilities.
The passivity exhibited by children using these visual technologies also disturbs Healy. Children often are literally slack-jawed watching TV, she said, and video games call upon students to use trial-and-error to recreate the programmer's solution. Such interactions don't tap into the generative power of children's minds, she said. "There's got to be a way to get these watchers' brains moving," she quipped. Her solution? Better software and interactive TV programs that push children to collaborate and use their brains to solve problems.