I really admire this teacher. He does things that I’m not sure I can do, and he does them well. He teaches in Virginia, mostly middle school math, and in a school that most of us would recognize as a tough place. Most of the students in his eighth-grade class come from low-income homes, very few of them with two parents in their lives, and many raised by grandmothers, aunts and foster parents. They are not, as a group, high scoring on most of their tests. Many don’t meet their grade-level standards in many subjects. But some do – more, in fact, than at many comparable schools. This teacher is tough, but never angry. His energy level is amazing. He seems to be talking almost all of the time, sometimes standing in front of the class, but sometimes leaning over a student’s shoulder, in a quiet voice.

 
He recognizes his students when they do the right thing. “Thank you, Joseph, for getting that pencil out. Thank you for being ready. Shawna, thank you for being ready.” The students might not feel that his thanks are deep and personal, but they like hearing them, and they rely on his acknowledgment to stay on track, to know that they’re doing the right things at the right time. In an otherwise chaotic environment, this guidance and reinforcement are obviously important and powerful. And he’s a fine teacher. He explains math concepts clearly, he cares about his students, and he gives them a surprising amount of one-on-one attention – not an easy thing to do in a class of 25 students, many struggling with the work.

 
In a different school in the same town, not far from the first and with a similar student body, another teacher is teaching math to eighth graders. The scene is very different. She doesn’t have the other teacher’s patter – she’s not thanking her students, and clearly they’re not as focused as a group. In fact, she has them sitting at clustered tables rather than in rows, designed, it seems, to have them less focused on the teacher and more on each other. She’s standing at the Smartboard in front of the class, talking about how to find the area of a triangle. She has a small girl standing up there with her, on the other side of the board. She’s talking to the class. “You start with the base, right?” she says, looking to the girl at the front of the room with her. The girl nods. “Once you know how long the base is,” the teacher continues, “you can start making your equation. But you need that first number to start with. So how long is the base?”

 
She turns her face to the girl up there with her, expectantly. The girl points to one side of the triangle. The teacher thinks for a minute – it’s hard to mistake the expression of a teacher thinking, especially when the teacher is a little bit surprised. This teacher was thinking of the line running side to side as the base of the triangle – the lower side, certainly the side I’d think of as the base, being a non-math person, because it’s right there at the bottom. But the math works with either of these sides of the triangle’s right-angle corner as the base. So she thinks for a moment and smiles at the girl, with that particular kind of smile that comes when you quickly solve a challenging puzzle.

 

“Yes,” the teacher says with affirmation in her voice, pleasure in it too, and even a little bit of relief – because she was clearly thinking, “Oops, she gave me the wrong answer. But wait. Why does the base have to be on the bottom? Any line can be the base in the triangle – I taught them that, and she remembers.” The teacher continued to work though the problem, the student was shy but clear enough and right on the money with the rest of her answers, and got plenty of praise as she got back to her seat.

 
The first teacher was a great talker; the second teacher was a great listener. Some students need more of one than the other, but the risk of being unbalanced – of being all one or all the other – is what I worry about the most. Personally, I want more teachers in my school like the teacher who listened so well to her student, who was so open-ended and respectful of her student that she noticed how right the girl was even when she seemed wrong at first glance. But I want her to know what the skillful, commanding talker does, and have those skills at her disposal as well.