My friend Bill Siegel was about to arrive at my new school in Los Angeles and I was anxious to hear what he would have to say about teaching – about his life working with teachers and kids, our school, his own family’s life in the public schools in and around Chicago, and what he still sees traveling the country from school to school, helping teachers practice a particular brand of inquiry-based learning that he is arguably the best in the world at.

 
Until about ten years earlier, we’d worked together, talked a lot, and walked through some schools together comparing notes, and tried to understand new and better ways to help make teachers more effective, and to bottle the magic of the schools where it all really worked so that we could sprinkle some of that good stuff on the many places where it didn’t. Bill in those days was mostly on the road; I was mostly in the office. But we’d felt a pretty good connection, and I trusted his testimony more than anyone else’s.

 
For years we’d been in touch only through a note here or a briefly crossed path there. I was anxious to learn what he’d seen in the last decade, and hear what he’d have to say to a group of teachers over a couple of hours of conversation and workshop time.

 
We began the teacher workshop by reading a text – a short essay about a hero who died rescuing people in a plane crash. Bill asked a question about the text; a few of the teachers in the room offered their thoughts in reply. He listened to their questions carefully, asked each a follow-up question or two, and kept the conversation focused on the essay. We were all seeing more layers to that essay, more reasons to like it or dislike it, more of the writers’ methods and ideas.

 
I mentioned, later in the workshop, how much I continued to think about the method of teaching by asking questions that I’d first thought seriously about when I worked with him those years ago, at the Great Books Foundation. He asked me why it was still on my mind – still in some ways an unanswered question for me. Because that kind of teaching represents my values, I said, but not my inclinations. I want to teach like that – but when I start teaching, I say too much, too often. My values tell me to slow down, to ask more and listen more, and I have to keep my personal-talking engine under control because it wants to keep revving itself up. The teacher wo listens more than he or she talks is the kind of teacher, in fact, I wish to be, but am often not.

 
Bill asked me about those values about teaching I hold, and he asked me about those inclinations that keep trying to run away with me. I remembered a philosophy professor thirty years earlier who had asked direct questions to me about why I believed what I believed. I remembered how I’d been so moved by that classroom exchange.

 
Bill was right there – and I don’t think any other teacher had been in that spot in the three decades in between – and I loved it. I felt listened to. I felt challenged. My ideas leapt ahead – I had to think fast, think deeply, think with my whole mind to keep up with his simple and direct interest in what I was saying. Every word I said, he weighed carefully. He didn’t say “Great, great.” He didn’t even smile. But he was clearly, profoundly interested in what I was saying.

 
A bit later, he said in passing, “If the hardest working person in the classroom is the teacher, you’ve got a problem.” I thought: Bingo. That’s the crux of those inclinations – I want to be the hardest worker, even when the work is better done by others. I was focusing too much in my story, on what I was doing, and too little on the stories of the students – what they were learning, with me or without me.

 
“If the hardest working person in the classroom is the teacher, you’ve got a problem.” That’s one of those fundamental ideas that changes everything. And it’s true. It shares a deep connection with two addition notions about teaching and learning.

 
When I took the job as the head of a school in Los Angeles, one thing I noticed right away was that aside from a case of sports trophies, the walls were mostly bare. In the weeks before we opened the doors for our first day of school in the fall, colleagues and I hung posters, pasted periodic-table shower curtains to the wall, and layered vinyl trees to the corners of a couple of stairwells. We also painted a few key phrases on the walls.
Across from the teachers’ lounge, we painted this in big letters: “Great teachers enter the classroom in order to learn.”