The first book I wrote about education begins this way: “Miss Whitman was doing everything wrong.”

 
Today, I’m the head of a grades 6-12 school, and a number of my colleagues have such dramatically different instincts about how to teach that I’m tempted now and then to sit them down and tell them how to do it differently. But I don’t. Sometimes my philosophy of teaching comes out most explicitly when I talk with the chairs of the departments at our school. I might tell the English chair, a brilliant woman who is just fantastic in the classroom, that her reliance of rubrics for writing drives me crazy. I believe in a totally different kind of approach. I know that the other approach works for me, and I’d love to convince my English chair that it would be better for her too, but I’ve failed so far, and I try hard to make it clear that she should teach in the mode that works best for her – and best for her students. I tell her that I think she is such a great teacher that she needs to keep doing things in the ways that work for her. I’d hate to move her from using lousy methods and getting great results to using better methods and getting lousy results, a real possibility in my mind. All that I ask of her is that she give the same freedoms to her teachers: she loves rubrics, she shows them how and why they work for her, but if her teachers have more success using different approaches, I want her to support them in the same way that I want to support her.

 
Now, a thoughtful observer could look at this approach to supporting the teaching at my school and think that it reflects an innate kindness, a desire to support teachers because of empathy and respect. Those who know me well are not likely to make that mistake.

 
Empathy is not really at play here, but rather a colder notion built of two observations. One is that we know very little about what makes a great teacher great. We generally don’t do well when we say something like, “There are three elements of good teaching, go do all three and you’ll be a good teachers.” The other is that the results of good teaching are clearly visible in student learning. We can recognize the teachers that help their students learn more and better than other teachers based on how well their students learn, based on where they start at the beginning of working with a teacher, and where they end up at different points down the road.

 
Put these two ideas together – the notion that the results of good teaching are clear to see, but that the process is less clear than we’d wish it to be – and the key task for building a great team of teachers becomes clear: recognize, support and encourage those who do it best.

 
What does that mean, practically? It means that giving teachers a range of ideas and tools to experiment with is very important, but that the teacher him or herself is the critical ingredient. Let the great teacher use the less-great tools, and a great result is still likely.

 
It means that great teachers need to be respected as artists more than as technicians. Their vision, their intuitive sense of relating to students, their ability to connect with students as individuals – these are the central elements of teaching that themselves cannot be taught. They come from the teachers’ character, the teacher’s heart and the teacher’s soul. We need to discover and cherish them, but we cannot really impart them, and more than we can imagine is done in the attempt to graft heart and soul upon the teachers who do not seem in their classes to have enough of either.