This is a different kind of book about teachers and schools. It doesn’t give advice on teaching better, or planning lessons, or managing the complex set of personalities to be found in every classroom. It doesn’t talk about brain research, or pushing students up the test-score ladder, or best practices for classroom management.

 
This book assumes that you know all that – or enough of it. It assumes that you can stand and deliver, that you can cover the curricular bases, and that you can do a great job helping students learn.

 
This book is about the most critical challenge that begins once you’re very good at your job as a teacher. It’s about your happiness.

Joy and happiness matter a great deal for exceptional teachers. They are the fundamental currency of the profession, and many truly amazing teachers don’t get enough of them. You know the statistics, and you’ve probably lived through the sad lessons they reveal: check on the group of new teachers that starts out in any given year, and in many schools, about half will be gone within five years. Too many will leave even though they love teaching and are well on the way to becoming truly outstanding and effective teachers. They take stock and decide that the negatives are just too negative and the positives are not positive enough. For many it’s a close call. They say things like, “If I could just have classes a little bit smaller,” or “If I could just get a little more support and respect from the administration,” or “If I could just have more time to work with those three or four kids who are really falling off track.”

 
Teachers need support: material support, community support, and personal support. Just as teachers need to acknowledge each student as a real human being in the middle of his or her own story, teachers themselves need exactly that same kind of recognition and regard. Great teachers need this more than most, and our collective enterprise of keeping these great teachers teaching makes it a vital if unmet imperative.

 
Every great teacher needs to see the power of his or her work acknowledged and celebrated. Every great teacher needs to hear the too-often unstated gratitude of students and their families. Perhaps most importantly, every great teacher needs to take the time to acknowledge his or her own love of teaching.

 
My friend Michael, a veteran English teacher in Massachusetts, is a gifted and energetic classroom leader and a man who cares deeply about his students. He can be a big-presence performer, and a quiet listener – he’s got a great range, and a great ability to match the right side of his personality to what his students need at any given moment. Ask him what makes him so good at his job and he’ll say, “It’s because I’m the luckiest man alive, and I know it. Here I am, earning my living, feeding my family, by talking about ideas and books every day, by guiding young people and their families through these amazing years of their growth. I am a lucky man.”

 
You feel the truth of every word as he says it, and if you’ve had the chance to know Michael for a few years as I have, you know that this is not simple enthusiasm. These feelings are hard won. For four years, after he left a teaching job that had stretched through a decade of enormous happiness and success, Michael began climbing up the administrative ranks at a couple of new schools and lost some of the happiness he’d had for years as a teacher. His sense of purpose was undiminished, but he began to feel less successful at his work – he wasn’t getting things done as an administrator as easily as he wanted to; he could not make his vision for his new schools quite real. He began looking, again, for a new professional home – for the right place.

 

As months and then years ticked by, Michael told one friend, “I think maybe I’ve been dreaming the wrong dream.” This was not ordinary sadness. This was an emptiness growing where an unusual fulfillment had once been. This was the hard learning of a man who’d grown up in a warm and rewarding professional home, discovering the harshness of the wider world.

 
Michael’s struggle was particularly great because the stakes were so high. He was not simply wrestling with finding a new job or smoothing a bump in his career path. He was fighting his way back to the work that he knew was a big part of his life’s purpose – work that he knows he does remarkably well, and that matters such a great deal. Imagine the feeling: you help young people make their way in the world – learn to read and write; learn to recognize and talk about beauty; learn the history of their country and the skills of thinking mathematically and scientifically – and you do it with great skill. You see the difference you, personally, make through your dedication and experience and skill, the difference you make in the lives of dozens and then hundreds of young men and women, and then you find the door to your classroom locked, the invitation to practice your craft rescinded, and the gifts you have to give unwelcomed. If it was just about you, that would be one thing, but this is about you and about the students you will no longer reach. A doctor barred from healing the sick, a singer banned from singing, a firefighter not allowed enter a burning house – that is the feeling of the exceptional teacher, contemplating the end to his or her path in the classroom.

 
And then the call came for Michael. An offer, unexpected, arrived: would you teach at and lead a new school – the right school? The familiar joy rushed back in. “You can’t tell me,” Michael said, “that there is a better way to live, a better way to step up in life every day with a hundred young people holding your hand. It doesn’t get better than that, and I know that there’s no one luckier than me waking up every morning.” That’s a fantastic sense of good fortune, but it’s more than luck, and more even than the payoff after years of discipline and personal challenge. The joy Michael celebrates is a vocational joy – a joy that comes from knowing that you are doing what you were put on earth to do.

 
The skill set of the teacher can apply to so many other fields – to law, to government, to television, to corporate leadership, to the sciences. But a teacher is here to teach. Feeling that in your bones, dedicating yourself to becoming unusually good at the craft and finding your place in the world by finding your place in the classroom – this is the joy that the great teacher feels every day, even if in hard times it might be easily overlooked. Like my friend Michael, we do ourselves and the world at large a great deal of good if we recognize and celebrate that joy every day.

 
We get too few social cues and formal invitations to step back and look at how vital and how joyous our work with students can be – not joyous every minute, and perhaps not every day, but joyous often enough that we keep in mind how lucky we are to do what we do. And while the truth of this statement is more than enough reason to say it and believe it, the larger reason to cultivate and celebrate the happiness of the great teacher is that students are the ultimate beneficiaries of this happiness.

 
Your happiness matters a great deal to your students. Your pride, your personal sense of accomplishment, and the mutual gifts you share with your students are perhaps the most important teaching tools in your classroom and can overcome just about any obstacle.

This book is an occasion to celebrate the joys of teaching, the skills and sacrifices of teachers, and the greatest teaching tool of all, the teacher’s heart.

I was at party recently – a fancy party. Many of the attendees were graduates of the same Ivy-League college, and they had their catching up to do after ten years or so of post-college life. One cluster was typical – a young doctor, a lawyer and an investment banker talking with my friend, a teacher.

 

They talked about spouses, vacations, missing old friends, and an adventure or two from their undergraduate days. Then the banker made some efforts to lure the teacher into confessing to the group how little she was paid. She told them – literally causing the lawyer to gasp. But all the while she displayed the happiness that wins any argument, and her old classmates felt just a little bit embarrassed in the end, just a little bit shaken to have forgotten for a moment (or perhaps for a decade) the deep good fortune of doing what we love, and doing it well.

 
When I think back on that party, I think of the teachers who start every school year shutting their classroom doors and telling their students, “We are all so, so lucky to be here together,” and really meaning it. I think of the people I know who haven’t been able to give up the social prestige of other jobs, or the higher salaries, or the sense that their parents or their siblings or their neighbors might think less of them if they became full-time teachers, and I feel even more fortunate myself. I never have a moment of doubt about the importance of my work as a teacher, and never a moment of wishing I was reviewing contracts for a living, or building houses, or even healing the sick. My calling as a teacher keeps me deeply connected to young people whom I can help, and who help me; whom I can teach, and learn from; who surprise me every day, and allow me to be the version of myself that makes me most proud.

 
I think, also, of all those teachers who have no shortage of bad days, chilly colleagues, and unthinking supervisors – and never enough dry-erase markers no matter how persistently they requisition or how many they buy. I think of how we can experience that terrible day, or that class that just does not work, or the student who will not recognize his own ability, and still feel that little flame of good fortune, of pride in our work, of knowing that we are doing the work we are here to do, flicker back on like a light in the darkness. Like most great callings, being a teacher can be difficult and at times thankless, but it remains a true vocation and a great anchor for any man’s or any woman’s life.

I sat at my desk at home some time ago and made a careful list of the truly great teachers I’ve had in my life, the teachers I wish I could sit with again right now.

 
Three stand out as having wowed me right from the start, traditional classroom teachers facing me in the fourth grade, in college and in graduate school: Shirley Spielman, Milton Kessler, and Bob Oprandy. Part of their magic is that you’ve probably never heard of them. They were not famous, merely great at what they did.

 
Spielman taught at P.S. 195 in Brooklyn, New York. She was a regal woman in her own way, probably not yet 40 when I was in her fourth-grade class, though she seemed eternally wise and fixed like a monument of steady knowledge. And she liked me. She seemed, in fact, to understand me. Her pace was measured. She’d look at me and think for a moment before continuing on to whatever else might have been on her mind. At the time, I thought she was unaccountably drawn to something going on inside me, but no doubt this was her way with most boys and girls in her class.

 
Milton Kessler was a professor at my college, though I never had him as a classroom teacher. Many of my friends did, including my girlfriend at the time (now my wife), and my two closest buddies. We were all aspiring writers; Kessler taught literature and poetry. He was a big, deep-throated man who had once been an apprentice opera singer. He was unafraid of emotion, smiled often, and seemed bewildered by the competitive intellectual games many of his students and colleagues played.

 
After I’d come back from a summer writing program at a notably indulgent college in Colorado and sought to arrange for academic credit at my home school, the first of two advisors I spoke with about the program grudgingly agreed to accept the credits so long as the other advisor – Milton Kessler – agreed as well. “That program,” advisor number-one had said, “makes me nervous. It’s more summer camp than academia.” With my head down, expecting trouble, I found Kessler and gave him the same pitch for the credits, adding sheepishly that I knew, alas, that the program was pretty summer camp-like. Kessler lit up. “Summer camp!” he said, with real enthusiasm. “I love summer camp!”

 
Bob Oprandy taught a graduate class called TESOL Classroom Practices at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He was a gentle man, a clear speaker, and an active but thoughtful presence in his classroom. I was in a Ph.D. program in literature at the time, and I’d quickly become used to teachers who dazzled – who displayed genius, wit and insight even when teaching very little, even when in fact students walked out of the seminar room feeling unattended, upstaged and (often) proven wrong.

 
Oprandy was the opposite. I found every sentence he spoke full of new information and new ways of understanding how people learn languages. He’d been the head of training for Peace Corps English teachers in West Africa for a time, and more than once mimed paddling a bark canoe around our classroom to help us understand the cadence of songs fishermen there sang to share important news about the river and its fish.

 
He seemed, simply, to have vital and interesting things to say all the time, though he said it all simply and without much fanfare. (He shared with the class once that he’d been asked by a student how much time he spend preparing for his classes. He said he counted for the first time after being asked – about eight hours, per class session. It was his first year teaching that course, just as he was finishing his own doctoral studies. We’ve kept in touch, and he puts a lot less time in prep these days, though I suspect he’s just as captivating in class).

 
Others teachers – teachers less likely to be found in classrooms – wound up on my list of great teachers too. Tom Wessels, a colleague at Antioch University who prefers to teach by walking through the woods with his students; a young woman named Anja, my student at Emerson College many years ago, who unfailingly added a joyous spirit to every lesson and every text we encountered; my father, who would answer my questions as he drove up and down the highways near New York City with the detailed precision of the engineer, the patience of a classroom veteran, and the casual intensity that a father brings to serious talks with his teenage son. All revealed ways of teaching beyond the classroom and beyond the school, and all inspired me to try to fit the magic of those paths, somehow, into my own work as a teacher.

 
I added more names to the list: colleagues whom I’ve admired. Todd Palmer; my wife Judy Temes; Denise Ahlquist; Bill Siegel; Jeff Guzman; many others.

 
After awhile I looked the list over and found a big surprise. The people on it had almost nothing in common. Some were highly structured and highly-prepared, using notes and diagrams to guide their classes. These were the teachers on my list who were not rebels by nature. They appreciate the benefit of other people’s experience and look for the good to be found in the received wisdom of veterans. Others on the list were happier making it up as they went, using finely-honed instinct, zigging and zagging as they followed the scent of real learning and the chance to make their students feel the big aha! moment. These were the skeptics and the trail-blazers, the teachers who want to make new things happen in their classrooms, who assume that the usual ways of doing things are, if not a trap, then perhaps a set of boundaries crying out to be crossed.

 
Some of the great teachers on my list you watched and right away you saw greatness. Others, not so much – though their students might one day tell you how these teachers had quietly changed their lives.

 
Some would end a class with students walking away glowing with new knowledge and purpose. Other would get notes from former students ten or twenty years later, describing how suddenly, all that time having passed, they’d come to realize how deeply they’d been affected by a question their teacher had asked them, a book she’d assigned, or just the sense of working with someone who cared so much – about the student and about the work.

It was quite a list of teachers. Some young, some old; some bursting with energy, some quiet and purposeful; some dramatic, and some calm and reflective. All different.

 

Is it possible that these great teachers had nothing in common at all? Could it be true that beyond my own personal list of great teachers, among the thousands and thousands of the very best there really might be no common traits or strategies?

 

Looking hard at my list, and adding to the exercise a good deal of careful study of teachers who are the most extraordinarily effective at what they do, I came to see that there are actually two qualities that genuinely great teachers share – one practical and one more personal and emotional.
The first is an intuition about when to change teaching styles to match the spirit of a given class in a given moment.

 

The second is genuine joy in being a teacher. Great teachers certainly share many other qualities, and many other skills and attributes are likely necessary to be a great teacher, but these are the big two shared by every great teacher I’ve had the privilege to know.

 

The great teacher is likely to have a great command of what people often call “best practices.” Yet some great teachers avoid or ignore them and still manage to get fantastic results, while many who used the best-proven methods just don’t translate them into outstanding learning among their students.

 

But two qualities are present all the time, no exceptions, among the teachers I’ve come to know and admire who are the best of the best at this uniquely demanding and rewarding job: first, that flexibility of approach and readiness to move from one style of teaching to another when the moment calls for it; and second, that inner happiness about being a teacher that kids can always feel and always appreciate. Both are there in every case of greatness.
“What I like about my math teacher,” one of my students at Pacific Hills School in Los Angeles tells me,

 

is that she’s not always doing the same thing, like a lot of teachers I’ve had before where they’re good teachers and everything, but sometimes you just feel like if they would be like an ordinary person instead of a teacher teacher, it would be a lot better.
You want to know that the teacher’s a person, and that if you feel a connection – if you learn from them – it’s not just because it’s their job, but because there’s something real happening between you. And you can’t feel that if she’s always doing the same thing. To me, that means she’s always doing her job.
But I don’t want her to be always just doing her job. Sometimes I want to feel like she’s listening to me because she really wants to, because she thinks I have something to say, not just because it’s her job. So if she’d telling us all something, that’s great. But then, please, listen a little, share a little, do something a little different that shows that you’re still there, still a person, and still paying attention even though your lesson’s over.

 

Students can recognize the teacher as a professional with a plan and a goal and a job to do, but they also know what it means to be seen and engaged by a real person. They want to see the range of who we are as teachers and as people who think and feel – not all the time, not including the embarrassing or private aspects of who we are, but including the pleasures and surprises of living and working with a roomful of interesting young people.
They want us to be real, as well as skillful. And they particularly love it when we’re happy, when we overcome the challenges of the classroom and share the pride and joy of working with our students to make important things happen.
“This is not the kind of thing you can fake,” Ben Ramos, a veteran history teacher at my school in Los Angeles, tells me.

 

I think, first and foremost, any teacher must behave like a regular old human being and then behave like a teacher. Being a great teacher, as simple as it sounds, begins with liking kids.
I truly believe and have seen so many times that the poor teachers truly don’t like kids as much as they probably should. For 19 years I have found this to be the case again and again. Human first, teacher second. I think a lot of teachers have it backwards, preachy and intellectual first. I have spoken to many students at the two schools that I have worked at in my 19 years and most of them find this to be a huge turnoff. I know that I can be intellectual with them, and I am, but I’m human first and foremost.

Looking closely at what makes the best teachers happiest, one big idea stands out: the greatest teachers love teaching in large part because they love learning.

 
They love the act of learning. They belong to that subset of people who look around at the world and say wow! a lot. More particularly, they have a passion for the subjects they teach, and their excitement about chemistry or poetry or history or photography lights up their students, and gives their classrooms genuine common purpose. And they not only love learning in general, and love learning about particular subjects, they love who they become when they teach and learn. Great teachers notice that different challenges bring out different sides of themselves, and they like the people they become when they teach. They say things like, “Teaching helps me be the version of myself that I really want to be.”

 
Consider this reflection by a Chicago English teacher:

I’ve done a lot of things in my life, and I’ve lived in a lot of places. I’ve earned my living with physical labor, working in offices wearing a tie, focusing on how much I can make in a day or a week of a month. And I know that with each outfit I put on, I was a little bit different. I was a different guy working on the phone selling financial services. I was a different guy delivering heavy boxes. And I know I’m a different guy working with 9th- and 10th-graders, helping them learn to write well, to read carefully and to think in a straight line. I’m a better listener. I’m a better father. I’m a better man. I like who I am better. I’m prouder. And that all boils down to being a happier guy, even though the work is pretty hard a lot of days.

 

Different Angles on Teaching Math in Japan

A set of videos of teachers teaching math in Japan in the 1990s have become kind of famous among American teacher-trainers. I had the chance not only to see them a couple of times with a few years in between each viewing, but also to view and discuss them with a group of other teachers I respect a great deal.

 
The first time I saw these Japanese math videos, I was struck that the class work was so collaborative. After years of hearing education reformers and politicians talking about how much more serious and successful Japanese math instruction was compared to American instruction, I was expecting a lot more drill-and-kill style rote learning. But in the videos, I saw much more teamwork, much more flexibility in how the teachers encouraged the students to think about a range of different ways to solve problems. There was a creativity, a skill in listening to their students and thinking through unexpected ideas that these math teachers brought to their classrooms that I loved. That was my big takeaway from my first viewing of the videos: these Japanese teachers are warm, creative, good-at-listening teachers, almost the opposite of what I had expected because of the narrow, outcomes-focused arguments of their American champions. Boy are these back-to-basics education reformers misinformed, I thought at the time – they think that math instruction in Japan is similar to old-fashioned rote learning, American style, circa 1920. But math students in Japan seem to be performing better than American students not because they’re sweating over their times tables more, but because their teachers are more creative and collaborative. That was a big revelation.

 
And then time passed. Years, actually. The debates on education ebbed and flowed, issues came and went. Japan’s economy crashed; Japanese businessmen stopped buying prestige office towers and golf courses in major American cities; New York City’s Rockefeller Center reverted to American ownership. Our national feelings of envy and vulnerability toward Japan faded. And then, recently, I saw the Japanese math videos again. And this time they looked very different. The cohort of Japanese middle-school math teachers were still more creative and flexible than our stereotype of a Japanese style of learning would suggest. But something more leapt out this time around: they were in love with math.

 

These teachers were skillful and engaged as classroom leaders, but they were equally engaged as students of mathematics themselves. And indeed there was a connection between these two traits: the fact that these teachers were so engaged in the interesting aspects of math that emerged in their lessons – when an unexpected answer popped up, they were not only receptive to the unthought-of approach because it’s good teaching to be that open, but they were also receptive because the new approach revealed more about alternative mathematical approaches to solving a problem. The genuine excitement in the room was not only about students being heard, but also about mathematical problems being illuminated by the noble (even if deeply imperfect) attempts of the students to comprehend and to solve them.

Paying particular attention to how great teachers feel about teaching does a number of important things for teachers, schools and students. Perhaps most importantly, paying attention to what makes great teachers happy helps these teachers stay in teaching; it reminds them of the good and great things about their vocation that too often pass by with too little attention. And this attention not only helps teachers stay, but it helps them stay engaged with their students and with the exploration of their subjects. It reminds them that teaching is not so much a performance as a set of reciprocal relationships that move like a see-saw on the playground, learning and teaching, giving and taking, the energy of one raising the energy of the other.

 

And finally, paying attention to what makes great teachers happy helps remind teachers how important being a great student is to being a great teacher. Learning more about your favorite teaching topics while sharing what you already know is an extraordinary way to earn a living, and something to be celebrated.

 

But happiness comes in many kinds, and the goal for a teacher should never be an easy happiness. Asking people to smile and be cheerful is exactly the opposite of the cultivation of real happiness. Far better to help teachers be happy by cultivating their opportunities to learn, and to help young people see the complex beauty of the world.

“I was very happy making a lot of money,” a teacher in Birmingham, Alabama, told me over lunch at his school.

 

I enjoyed the lifestyle, I enjoyed the feeling that I was good at something that was hard to do, and I felt like I was putting my energy into something very productive. But I also felt that there was a narrowness to my life because of my work. I knew a lot about a particular industry where I was making decisions about new loans and structuring pay-backs from old loans that weren’t performing, weren’t being paid back. So I knew the companies, I knew the dynamics of the marketplace, I knew the movers and shakers. Some of the people were very nice, and some weren’t.
I wouldn’t say that I’d think a lot about them when I went home. I wouldn’t say that I really cared that much about them outside of the business we were doing together. In fact, I think that everyone in a job like mine is encouraged not to care too much, and not to know too much about the personalities you’re working with. If I’m turning you down for a loan, if I’m taking something out of your business to sell to pay back some funds you can’t pay back, I don’t think I’m going to do a better job by knowing and caring for you. It’ll cloud my judgment. I think that took a toll on me.
I wanted to care more about the people I worked with. Not just to make a difference, like so many people say – and that’s true, too – but to look at the people I’m working with and say, yes, I want to know what your struggles are, I want to know your story. And now – wow, did I get what I asked for! Maybe sometimes too much so, but I know that I’m a better teacher to my high school students when I know their stories, and I never have to turn off that human side of myself. I get to be a more complete person, and my personality isn’t sliced into the parts that are OK for work, and OK for home, and I’ve got to keep them apart. I’ve been able to reunite my mind and my heart by becoming a teacher, and I hope I’ll never have to have them so separated again.

“I’m kind of a messy thinker, left to myself,” a fifth-grade teacher from Ohio told me when I visited her classroom and was swept up in her excitement for teaching grammar.

 

I know what a great thing it is to have that punctuation right there where you need it, doing the right thing, and helping your thinking unmess itself. This is the trick I teach my students: writing is a kind of thinking, and it’s the kind of thinking where you can make your thinking almost perfect.
You can pick exactly the right word, you can put exactly the right pause in when you want to have a little space between your words, and you put a colon in here: BOOM! ‘Listen to this,’ the colon says, ‘this is going to explain everything.’ Or you can put that charming semi-colon in there, and say these two ideas are good, good friends; they don’t want to be pushed apart by a full period, though they’re not quite so close cousins as a comma would imply. Oh, it’s fun! And it lets students really think long and hard about their own ideas, and how they really want the words to lay out there and tell their story, in just the right way.

And as I said, my thinking is really kind of messy when I’m stirring up some new ideas, but the pleasure of making all the pieces fit together, of getting everything clear and fully expressed, is just a great joy. I feel it when I stand up there in class and unveil the secrets of the these great little devices, that subtle semi-colon and the careful comma, and of course there’s the mysterious ellipses. . . You know, I get excited just thinking about it.

 

This is the joy of learning, and the love of subject-matter, that the great teacher could not shake even if he or she tried.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle’s advice about the moral dimensions of happiness has some importance here. Happiness, Aristotle told his students, is not about the satisfying of our appetites (eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, and generally getting what we want in the short term); and it is not about the honor and prestige that others might bestow upon us, nice as honor and prestige can be.

 

Happiness, he said, is really about virtue. It’s about doing good for others, and doing what a person is most suited to do – reaching one’s potential actively, publicly and with the good of others in mind. Aristotle could have been addressing a national teachers’ convention for how on-point his view of happiness is for people who make their living in the classroom.

 
He celebrates the particular kind of happiness that great teachers feel – and need to feel – as they get in the groove of their work. It’s the happiness of doing and learning and serving, of discovering and re-discovering alongside young people who need a guide, and giving those young people a strength they’d otherwise be without.

 
It’s hard and sometimes lonely work, often undervalued and too easily overlooked in a busy world. But Aristotle understood that virtue springs from action and that too few of us have the privilege to work to our limits physically, intellectually and even spiritually, as the engaged teacher so often does.

All of the great teachers I have known and observed are motivated in personal ways. They teach in large part for what I think of as the “selfish unselfish” reasons. They are totally focused on helping their students – they are altruists – but they have a personal need to see themselves as helpers. They feel that teaching helps them become better people. “I have trouble,” a young math teacher in California tells me, “thinking of myself doing something else. I mean, I know I could do a lot of other things, but I don’t think I want to be someone else. Who I am when I’m working with my kids here, that who I really want to be.”

 
These teachers share a motive for teaching that has two sides. They really do want to help people. And they really do want to be the kind of person who helps people. It’s all about the people they help. But it’s also all about shaping their own stories. This is the part of the puzzle I think we can fairly call the HEART.

 
These great teachers really know how to teach – and, a shade differently, they really love the subjects they teach. They are good at the surface actions of good teaching: they explain things clearly; they build trust and respect in their classrooms; they manage their classes well; they sequence lessons in good, developmental ways. But they are also good at the deeper essence of teaching: they love knowledge, and they want to learn more, every day, about the subjects they teach. This part of the puzzle we can call the MIND.

 
These great teachers also have a great intuition for when to change their styles of teaching on the fly. They don’t lecture for an hour because that what the schedule calls for; instead, they sense when their students need a different approach to a topic – when it’s time to settle down and write, or to break up into teams, or to share some essential information in a quick lecture. They move from mode to mode as teachers because they are so well tuned into the feelings, thoughts and rhythms of the room. This part of the puzzle we can call the EAR.

 
So, that’s what the great teachers I have gotten to know all share in common: they have the teacher’s heart, the teacher’s mind, and the teacher’s ear. They want deeply to help their students learn and grow, in part because they feel a personal mission to be that kind of person; they love learning more about the subjects they teach and fill their classrooms with that love of learning; and they can feel when to change their teaching styles to fit the needs of their students. Heart, mind and ear. Great teachers – whether big and blustery or modest and mild, carefully organized and flying by the seat of their pants – have these three gifts, and work at keeping them finely tuned.