Great teaching is situational. Different groups need different strengths, at different times. If you’re working with a student who does not have solid skills in basic multiplication and addition, or an understanding of the vocabulary you’re using, and you share a lesson in algebra that looks and feels absolutely brilliant in a different room with different students, you’ve probably done very little good and more than a bit of harm. In fact, you’ve probably presented this student a model of not getting it when a teacher teaches that makes confusion, or tuning out teachers, feel normal.

 
The great lesson – the great teaching – isn’t great if the learning that it seeks to make happen isn’t happening. In fact, there is no great teaching if there’s no great learning. How good a job I do as a teacher is really not the point: how good a job the students do learning is the whole game. If I help that learning happen – however clumsily, with whatever amount of bad form or rule-breaking – I’m a great teacher in that moment.

 
It’s often hard for teachers – and even more importantly, people who supervise teachers – to grasp this. The teachers whom we are most likely to be impressed by are the ones who have that dazzle – if they were actors, they’d own the screen; as soldiers, they’d be the natural leaders in battle; as salesmen, they’d rack up the biggest sales, because they’re the kind of people who make the rest of us feel good. They make us feel like we’re in the presence of someone special, and we like hearing them talk and making them happy. Many of these gifted charmers are indeed great teachers. But only if they listen, only if they go where their students need to lead them. The charisma and attention-commanding charms that so many of us love to see – in the classroom as well as anywhere else – can be profound distractions from what the students need to be doing and thinking.

 
The clearest place to see this is in the videos of teachers teaching that many faculty job applicants and education-school graduates carry around with them. The first clue is whom, exactly, you see when you watch the video. At one extreme, you see a teacher in front of class, and clearly the film suggests that the teacher is the center of the room, the actor on the stage. You see students from behind, or at a sharp angle, and while you see the teacher doing his or her thing, you don’t see the students do the things that really matter in the classroom, the learning things.

 
At the other extreme, you don’t see the teacher. Instead, the teacher is holding the camera, and you – the viewer – find yourself moving around the classroom, looking over students’ shoulders, looking students in the eye when the teacher has a one-to-one conversation, and seeing the students pop up and listen when the teacher says something like, “Hey everyone, while you’re working on your boxes, keep this in mind. . .”

 
The teachers-as-performers do something we’ve all come to expect – they are the stars in the theaters of their classrooms, performing. They create the energy in the room, they direct the lessons, they’re the movers and shakers in their little worlds. They might play that role well or poorly, but it’s their role. The process of learning centers on them; students follow the teacher’s lead.

 
Teachers-as-coaches do something different: they present the class challenges, stir the pot that is already bubbling with energy and talent, and follow the paths that students chart. These teachers set the parameters and offer challenges and tools, but they want students to lead as they spur on their classes to get things done.

 
The idea that school teachers should not simply teach from the podium, and that their strong and direct leadership of the classroom could have limiting effects on their students, was largely a new one that mavericks in the twentieth century from John Dewey to A.S. Neill fought to make heard. They certainly succeeded. Today it’s a cliché to say that instead of being “the sage on the stage” the teacher can be “the guide on the side.” Many are ready to argue for the traditional mode of teachers as masters of their classrooms, but it’s no longer a safe assumption that your child’s teacher or mine sees the world that way.

 
But the big mistake here is to see one approach as the right approach. Again, great teaching is situational. There are times a student, or a class, needs to hear something said, write it down, think about it, and remember it. There are times, too, when a class needs to break into contending opinions and voices, and there are times when a class learns best with each student focused on a distinct task, workshop-style. This is what the ninth-grade math teacher understood, and acted on. She might not have been brilliant when she spoke to the class – but she was brilliant in her higher-level thinking about the kind of instruction the fit the moment perfectly.