I once worked with a man who, after a long career as a college administrator, found himself in the happy circumstances of sitting on a pile of tens of millions of dollars, awarding a few of these millions every year to people doing research into teaching and learning, on behalf of a well-known foundation. He was a research psychologist, more precisely an authority on the behaviorist school of psychology.

He told me about a thrilling breakthrough in his work: he’d found an agricultural economist at a state college in the south who had developed a precise statistical model for establishing how much difference individual teachers were making in their students’ learning. Looking at test scores both before and after new class terms, clustering statistically similar students into comparative groups, and backing out the influence of outside learning, this agronomist was able to look across his state, and point to the teachers that really were better than the rest in helping students learn. He could point to the top ten or twenty percent – the stars. And he could point to the dividing line between the better-than-average and the worse-than-average teachers. I got excited hearing about this, too. I assumed that with this tool, a school district could look at each year’s crop of new teachers, identify the better than average, and secure them to long-term contracts, while offering thanks and a fond farewell to the others. But that wasn’t the idea.

“We believe,” my senior colleague told me, “and in fact we’re certain of it, that a great teacher is what a great teacher does. We’re certain that we can show the not-so-great teachers what it is that their better-performing peers actually do, and we can help these other teachers do it too. So that everyone improves significantly, and you don’t simply identify the existing high performers. You make more of them.”
I wasn’t convinced.
Talking with many of my favorite teachers – men and women who taught me in school, who taught my children, who have made me say “wow” when I think about what they do for their students – I’ve come to doubt him. I’ve seen too many teachers do what I think of as the wrong thing, ranging from being mean to students to teaching in ways that I can’t stand, get fantastic results.
The relationship between teacher and student can be so complex, and the real exchange of ideas and feelings that leads to genuine learning so intricate and subtle, that I have no doubt that there is, in addition to a set of skills and techniques, an additional and quite large factor in being a great teacher that can’t be taught. The teacher’s personal character and ability to connect emotionally with students are certainly big parts of this mysterious quality, but there’s more to it. Reading the room and being able to switch modes of instruction at the right time is a part of it too, as is the pure joy that a great teacher takes in learning. But there’s a quality of being a great teacher that I think can’t be reduced further – that can be recognized, increased, and supported, but not imparted if it’s simply absent to being with.
As an observer and leader of teachers, I have to be humble. I have to say, at times, this teacher is making great things happen. The kids are happy and learning what they need to learn. And I couldn’t tell you how it’s being done, because I sure wouldn’t do it that way – but I love this teacher. I love the success. I love seeing the kids learn. And so my eyes are always open, and I try not to let the limits of my own theories of what makes a great teacher get in the way my ability to see greatness when it’s right there in front of me.