James MacGregor Burns was a great teacher and writer.  Burns wrote about American political history and about leadership in society (among many other things). His distinction between what he called “transactional leadership” and “transformational leadership” sheds a lot of light on what happens in some of the best classrooms, led by some of the greatest teachers.

 
Transactional leadership, as Burns describes it, is what most leaders do when they give people what they already know they want or need. The teacher who gives me the information I need to know about the Russian language, or about outer space, or about Walt Whitman is a transactional leader. The fellow who serves me up my ice cream cone when I go to the ice cream store is a transactional leader. The congressman who goes to Washington and votes exactly the way I want her to vote is a transactional leader. These are men and women who give the people what they want – sometimes brilliantly.

 

Transformational leaders are different. These are the people who help others aspire to new and better things. They don’t just give people what people already want; instead, they inspire people to have different and better wants.

 

When you walked into shop class hoping to figure out how to change the oil in your car but left after six months turned-on to high-level physics because of what you learned about how a car’s engine works, you were the beneficiary of transformational leadership. When you showed up for work hoping to make a decent wage and, in addition, discovered a vocation that would fill your days with wonder and beauty, you were on the receiving end of transformational leadership. When your congressman convinced you – and the world – that the tax break or the federal loan program or the new initiative to build a bridge was not the waste you thought it was but actually could be the beginning of better age for our entire community, transformational leadership was happening.

 

The best teachers are transformational, and they live for the chance to help a student see the higher-level dreams that they might dream, the complex and richly rewarding aspirations that they might adopt, the gears and wheels and power inside of themselves but unrecognized, ready to be applied to a life’s journey, or a day’s jaunt, bound to create wonder and happiness.

 

Imagine: a group of students enters a classroom simply hoping to have a good-enough day, to secure a B+, to have a decent school lunch, and leaves with the constellations forming before their eyes, with visions of the Serengeti and the sub-atomic workings of nuclear fission dazzling their imaginations. They read a story hoping to find the main idea, and discover versions of themselves they did not know they could become – but now, clearly, the path is clear: there it is, in that story, opening before them. They are, in a way, transformed.