I love what Todd Palmer had to say in a note to me about what makes him happiest as a teacher. Todd was one of my favorite colleagues at a small school in Los Angeles. What matters most to him, he wrote, is that “I get the chance to be the kind of teacher that I didn’t always have – someone who is sympathetic and empathetic.”

 

Todd’s a great teacher not because he’s surveyed the evidence and decided to do what works best, but because he brings a passion to his teaching that fills in the empty places for himself and for his students.

 

A teacher like this is more than skilled; he’s not going to put in a good day’s work and go home. He’s motivated by his entire sense of who he is – or more accurately, who he wants to be – to make a difference for his students. He won’t tire, he won’t check out early, and he won’t leave the task of reaching these kids half-done, because his passion for teaching is about setting right things he has felt for a long time. There’s a personal, moral quality to what he does as a teacher, and it is powerful. I wish I had more colleagues like him.Todd’s heart is clearly engaged in his life as a teacher.

 

Even though he often seems restrained and has an orderly approach to his class preparations, he is driven by principles rather than practices. He’s not a teacher for dispassionate reasons; his personal engagement is so obvious to his students that even the slightest change in the tone of his voice can create a dramatic ripple. When he offers a student praise – or tells a student to change her behavior – everyone understands that this quite-seeming man is fully engaged. His quiet praise has the full impact of a man saying something he truly believes, recognizing the person he’s talking to and making a lasting note to himself about the genuine success he’s seeing unfold in the classroom.

 

And when he tells a student to stand up and leave the classroom – again, quietly, though firmly – there is no chance for a student to mistake Mr. Palmer’s actions for a teacher simply operating out of the school rulebook. This is a man facing you, a real person, genuinely seeing what and who you are, and unhappy with what he sees.

 

His full presence in the classroom makes every small gesture deeply meaningful. He keeps his students engaged specifically because something in his classroom feels different from so many other parts of school life. The ordinary dynamics of human behavior have been left in the on position – not turned off and substituted by a different and less personal set of rules called “school.” When Todd talks to his class, he commands attention in the same way that any man with something to say would command attention by standing up and talking to the people around him about global warming or earthquakes, calling people by their names and taking note of their behavior. He’s not playing a game, and he has not left parts of himself in the teachers’ lounge. He’s all there.

 

Having observed Todd in the classroom, I can testify that he hears every word that his students say. There’s little chatter in this room because he doesn’t overlook his students’ words, even if they’re spoken in whispers in the back of the room. He’s known as a serious disciplinarian, though not a mean one. His middle-school students behave noticeably better in his class than in some others. What’s the magic? “My students,” Mr. Palmer says, “understand that I mean what I say.”

Most people are at least a little bit lonely. There’s some good evolutionary value to this – we tend to cling a bit more tightly to each other, to be a little more aware of each other’s needs at least in part because most of us usually feel a bit needy. That vestigial feeling of loneliness motivates us to take action, to preserve connections and to overcome the good reasons to tell others to bug off. Some of my friends and colleagues seem to know this – but the younger ones are a little bit less likely to know it. In fact, students often labor under the illusion that they themselves are the only ones who often feel lonely.

 
Most teachers of middle- and high-school students can see that even when they’re clearly among the most popular kids in class, students often feel freakishly lonely – not just melancholy because they want to connect more with others, but certain at some level that they feel this more often and more deeply than other kids do. And it may take decades for most of us to learn, through relationships that let us see into the emotional lives of others year after year, that indeed this feeling is simply a part of being human.

 
There’s an odd-seeming but very common dynamic at issue here – the feeling of being an outsider, the only lonely person in a crowd that seems connected and happy, the one person not truly a member of the club. Some of the best teachers I’ve known are particularly good at recognizing when students feel too much like outsiders, and they often share an interesting remedy. Instead of the too-simple urge to say, in some way or another, “you’re wrong” – you are popular, or as popular as someone can get; you are as much of an insider as just about everyone else, even if you don’t feel it – these great teachers share a different message: I’m an outsider too, because we all are.

 
The poet Emily Dickinson catches the emotional note here perfectly in one of her best-known poems, celebrating the nobody-ness of being an outsider in a direct appeal to the reader’s lonely heart:

 
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

 

 Some teachers understand what this poem reveals about the student who stands on the outside of the circle.. And the best teachers remember that we are all outsiders in some ways, even people who seem to be insiders.

 

My first college teaching job put me inside a very fancy institution, and while some people might have assumed that I belonged there, I never felt it. It was only with the help of others who were clearly outsiders that I held on long enough to feel successful in that job. One of those outsiders was a man named Pat Hoy, recently retired as a colonel, and an English professor, at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Harvard drove him crazy – and me, too, though for different reasons. I was lucky to find that Pat was one of my supervisors. He was my boss, and my teacher, and he made it clear that my feeling like an outsider was in its way a badge of honor. I was a part of his club, even if not part of the bigger club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When a teacher can create this feeling, great things can happen.

 
Creating this feeling won’t cure any of us of that basic human loneliness, but it will help us recognize that while we may be lonely, we are not alone. This is kind of decency, or being a good human being first, as a necessary condition to being a great teacher, that Ben Ramos talked about.

“I love what you did with x right here,” Peter Hirzel says to his 9th-grade algebra student. “I think I can hear the wheels spinning there,” he adds with a smile.

 
He’s looking over a student’s shoulder, seeing what she’s done to balance an equation and get her x standing alone on one side of the equal sign. She’d had a number of choices – divide by this, multiply by that – and Mr. Hirzel is looking carefully at this student’s work to see not only which path she’s taking, but how she chooses, and what kinds of paths are most natural or attractive to her when she has more than one to choose from. He’s watching her work and listening to her think out loud – his work is the watching and listening – but not so much to ensure that she’s doing what he wants, or following his instructions. Instead, he’s trying to figure out her own instructions, how she’s guiding herself through a challenging problem, in part by applying principles he has given her, but in part by opening the toolbox of her mind, interpreting his instructions, discovering insights, and making her way as an original thinker.

 
In another classroom, in another city, a music teacher stops a brass band after they make their way through a challenging phrase in a short musical score and he says to his saxophone player, “OK, OK, I can hear what you’re doing. Where you just blew ba-pa-BAH? Try it with a softer touch on that opening note. Go softer on that -ba- right when you open there. I think I just heard what’s holding you back, now. It’s that little ba. Just hit it a little softer, and you’re right there.” The student picks up his saxophone, plays the phrase, and his teacher smiles a big smile. “That’s it! You got it! You were just jumping on that one note a little too much, a little too eager. That’s all you do now, just soften that up, and everything else you’ve got going on, it’s all just right. You’re already there.” (The teacher is Poncho Williams, one of the truly great Jazz horn players alive today).

 
That phrase sticks in my mind: “You’re already there.” We tend to see a student do something wrong, take a false step, and assume that we need to start over, go back and retrace the steps along the path that got our student lost. But so often, a student isn’t lost. Instead, the student might be hitting one note on a slant, might be thinking about x in a slightly different way, or even seeing something in text that I, as a teacher, failed to see. We erase too much that’s too good but starting all over.

 
Here’s how this plays out in an English class for me every now and then: I’ll be reading a student essay about Homer’s Iliad, as an example, and I’ll see a line saying something like, “Achilles, the ultimate hero in the Iliad, is the greatest fighter in the first half of the book, and he wins many victories.” There may be a page or so to follow, but unless I’m careful, I’ll give in to the urge to stop reading for a moment and write a note in the margin like this:
You must have gotten Achilles mixed up with another character – maybe Agamemnon? – who fights and wins battles in those early chapter of the book. Do you remember our class discussions about how important it was that Achilles removed himself from battle and refused to fight? That’s perhaps the most important event in the beginning of The Iliad. Please work harder to make sure you’re observing and absorbing these key details.

 

But I would be wrong if this student continues with something like this: “While it’s true that Achilles does not fight, he is actually a greater hero, and a greater warrior, for staying out of the literal battle. He overcomes expectations and provides a model of a hero who says ‘no’ to the idea that any man has a duty to fight and kill other men.” Now, I might argue about whether this interpretation is true, but it surely is much more sophisticated that I’d have guessed from the first sentence.

 

As the argument continues on, I say to myself, “Oh, there’s a lot more to this student’s thoughts than I’d imagined at first. What looked like a factual mistake was actually a deeper way of thinking about and writing about the story.” And then I have to ask myself how I might have reacted to this idea if it were presented in class. Even more important – what if the student were a careful thinker, but not a brave talker? What if the student had the whole idea in mind, but only expressed the first part – “Achilles was a great fighter in the beginning of the book”? Would I have said “No, he wasn’t – you got it wrong”? I hope not. I hope I’d respond with a genuine question, something like, “Really? How so?” Or maybe even something as bold as, “Wow, I don’t think I see that – can you show me?”
Instead of pushing back the student’s seemingly wrong answer, the far better instinct would be to lean closer, to try to hear more and act on the assumption that students often, even when I least expect it, have more going on below the surface than most of us imagine.

 

“There was a day, in my second or third year of teaching, when I saw the light-bulb go off for one of my students. Not the usual “Now I get it” kind of light-bulb, but a bigger idea showing up – a new curiosity. Suddenly the clouds parted for this girl, and she wanted to learn something different, something bigger.”
– Third-grade teacher, Florida.

This teacher describes a profound moment – the moment when a student has done more than learn something new, more than answer a question, and instead has discovered a higher curiosity. The student has taken a leap in desire to learn.

 
It’s a funny kind of aha! moment. Instead of finding the main idea of a character’s motivation, the literature student suddenly wants to know why a character in a story might be unhappy and disappointed in the world. It’s the moment a science student understands that Einstein’s theory of relativity – E=mc2 – means that matter actually turns into energy, and is therefore no long there. Beyond “getting” that fact, when the student asks “How in the world could that be possible?” the teacher has leapt, hand-in-hand with the student, to a new level of learning.

 
The moment a student looks up from his notebook – in which he may have written a perfectly clear and insightful answer to an assigned question about what a character in a book thinks and feels – and says to his teacher, “But why, why is he so sad?,” the teacher knows that a new ambition to learn and understand has shown itself – a great day for the teacher, and a great day for the student.

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.

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.

 

Moments of transformational learning moments come in many different shapes and sizes. Sometimes they happen when a student works quietly with a teacher one-on-one; sometimes they arrive when a student leaps up in a lecture hall and says, “Oh my God! I get it!” And sometimes they happen when one student challenges another, and it goes something like this:

“Gabby, you can’t really be saying that you think it would be right for a person to let another country invade their own country, even if their own country was wrong.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“But imagine if you were alive in the 1800’s, when there was slavery, and France wanted to invade to free the slaves. You would fight against France to defend your country, wouldn’t you?”
“Absolutely not. I’d make a big banner that said ‘I love the French.’”
“No way.”
“Totally would.”
“But it’s your country!”
“But I have a duty to actual human beings when they’re being made slaves that’s more important than my feelings about something that’s not a person, like a county. I can’t let someone suffer and die just because my country wants me to.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“I do.”
“Wow. I have to think about this.”

The great teacher is lit up by this kind of exchange. The great teacher sees and feels the doors opening, the new-idea thinking taking place, and feels a happiness that no amount of money, no public applause, no private beauty could come close to equaling.

 

And this is very much the kind of exchange that I imagine seeing – and trying to make happen as often as possible – around a seminar table, like the one I have in my own seminar room at my school, where I teach middle-school and high-school students. More often than not, we sit around a big wooden table, face to face. The feeling is very different from when I stand in front of a class filled with chairs and tables facing m. It’s very different from the work I can do with students when we’re one-on-one. And it’s different from when they’re writing or building something and I wander around the room and look over their shoulders, asking a question now and then, or giving a little advice to a student here and there.

 

What I’ve just described here are the three main modes of education:
– Lecture (teacher in front, giving out information),
– Seminar (everyone around a table, sharing ideas), and
– Coaching (teacher helping a student one-on-one, often looking over the student’s shoulder to see the world from the student’s perspective).

 

Being able to choose which of the three suits a specific group at a specific moment, and moving fluidly from one to the other, turns out to be of supreme importance, a fact that I first began to think about because of the work of a teacher and writer named Mortimer Adler.

 
Adler was one of the great and amusing figures of twentieth-century American education. A high-school drop-out at the age of 14, he became a young newspaper man in the 1920’s, learning in the process how little he actually knew about the world. Hungry for knowledge, he began taking night courses at local colleges. Finding his way to Columbia University through his characteristic blend of charm and hectoring arrogance, Adler completed his undergraduate studies there (though without taking his bachelor’s degree, because he could not pass the required swimming test), as well as a doctorate in psychology.

 
He studied at Columbia with the founders of the Great Books movement – scholars including John Erskine, Mark van Doren, Whittaker Chambers and Jacques Barzun. When his friend Robert Maynard Hutchins was named president of the University of Chicago at the tender age of 29, Adler joined him as a faculty member and partner in the project of bringing Columbia-style Great Books education to the center of the rapidly growing Chicago campus.

 
Occasionally impressing his students while almost constantly infuriating his colleagues, Adler was denied a faculty position in the university’s psychology department even though the president of the university was his uncompromising sponsor. He served instead as a professor of law, though he did not have a law degree.

 
Adler eventually departed the faculty at Chicago in order to help run a number of projects and institutions less needing of compromise in their educational focus, including the Great Books Foundation, the Great Books of the Western World project at Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Aspen Institute.

 
At the Encyclopedia Britannica, backed by millions of dollars invested by supporters including the University of Chicago administration, Adler led the development of a 54-volume set of formal volumes – looking very much like a set of encyclopedias and derided by writer Dwight MacDonald at the time as “Books-as-Furniture” – that included a guide to 102 “Great Ideas” woven through the centuries of texts. Not 101, not 103, but exactly 102. This insistence was typical of Adler: certainly wrong to at least some degree, but still eye-opening and captivating to anyone who cares about (hard to find another word for it) ideas. In the 1980’s, as Adler was enjoying his own ninth decade, his ideas turned to K-12 schooling. As the co-founder of the Great Books Foundation, dedicated for its first few decades to bringing inexpensive editions of the classics to libraries and living rooms across the country accompanied by rigorous, inquiry-based discussion groups facilitated in every case by leaders chosen and trained by Chicago-based foundation staff, Adler had seen the organization’s foray into the classrooms of America begin in the 1970’s, and become a cash cow worth several million dollars a year by the time the reform of public education rose to the top of the national agenda with the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” the report of President Ronald Reagan’s highly-publicized National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983.

 
Adler thought that the Great Books Foundation’s work in schools had been quickly watered down to suit the politics and bureaucratic habits of the public schools, and had in fact beaten President Reagan to the stage with a major proposal to retool the American school system. Adler’s model, captured in his book The Paideia Proposal, included a call for a national curriculum, and an emphasis on teaching skills in the classical modes of logic, rhetoric, and mathematics, and a focus on teaching students to be active and skillful learners on their own time, throughout their lives.

 
But most important for me – the part of his little book that gave me my own big aha! moment – was his simple description of the three basic modes of instruction: lecture, seminar and coaching. Know which mode suits which school activity, Adler advised, and you’ll do a better job than most schools do today.

 
When reading a thoughtful text, don’t spend too much time lecturing – seminar-style discussion is essential. When teaching mathematics, be sure to lean on coaching as the core mode; it’s perfectly suited to helping students learn challenging, active skills like addition, multiplication and factoring. And when teaching factual information about history or science, lecturing is important at least part of the time – don’t be afraid of it, even if it does not suit your ideal vision of student-centered schooling.

 
In the lecture, the teacher has important information and stands before the students to share it. In the seminar, all face each other around a table, and this is where teaching by asking questions is most valuable and powerful. And in the coaching moment, the teacher stands alongside the student, and both move forward together, the teacher helping the student to find the way and anticipate what each new step will bring.

 

 
This might seem like the most obvious of ways to talk about schooling, but it was particularly vital for me because when I first read Adler’s book I was working as the head of the Great Book Foundation, living in Chicago in the shadow of Hutchins and Adler and often dealing with critics who found fault in the seminar-style, inquiry-based teaching model we advocated. With Adler’s discussion in mind, I became more comfortable telling people that of course our approach wasn’t the right way to teach all subjects all of the time – there was also lecture and coaching, and both had their important roles.

 
And over time, as I observed more and more great teachers at work, it slowly became clear that often the key to what they were doing was not being particularly brilliant at any one of the three modes of teaching, or even at all three, but the key was knowing – or feeling – when to move from one mode to another, seamlessly. It’s the smooth motion among roles, knowing intuitively when the moment calls for one rather than another, that marks the extraordinary educator, in my experience.

 
Here’s what it looks like: A ninth-grade math teacher is talking about how to solve for x in an algebraic equation. She makes a list of three steps in the process. She writes the list on the board. She calls on individual students to repeat back the three steps, in sequence. They can do it. But she sees the puzzled faces – they’re hearing the three steps, but not feeling exactly how to do them. She puts up a sample problem on the board and solves it, step one, step two, step three. A couple of kids actually call out, “I get it.” But only a couple. Now she puts another, similar problem on the board, and asks students to solve it on their own, at their seats.

 
As they get to work, she begins to wander around the classroom, leaning over students shoulders, whispering to one, “Now you’re ready for step two,” and telling another, “Don’t jump over a step – see this?” – she point to the student’s note paper where the problem is laid out in pencil – “grab that x there, and move it to the other side of the equation. Do you remember how to do that by dividing by x on both sides?” She walks back to the board and puts up another two equations. “Bonus problems,” she says, “if you’re super speedy today. But what matters most is working carefully to solve that first problem.” She continues her rounds, talking with most of the students, guiding them in their work.

 
She began by lecturing – and she had some success getting her three-step process across. But she could see the need to shift into coaching mode, and then once she’d begun working one-on-one with a couple of students, even for a brief moment with each, she understood how valuable this coaching was for them at just this moment, so she bought herself more time for more coaching by putting those extra problems up on the board. On the whole, a terrific bit of teaching, measured most importantly by the successful learning going on in the room.
And here’s this lovely tale. I’d like to title it, “The Correct Answer is a SNOWBALL.”

I like to teach in a few different modes. But I’m not always sure which is the right one until I’m in the room and working with the students on a given day. I can have a discussion, I can lecture, I can ask the students to write or draw. The key for me is what seems to work.
I might start out talking about something in American history – the Boston Massacre, for example – and I can start lecturing about a particular topic. This event, it turns out, began when a kid threw a snowball at a British guard.
So we can say that the first weapon used in the American Revolution was a snowball. I can take this in a number of different directions. If the kids are attentive, and they’re in that mood of wanting to drink up knowledge, I might just tell them – “And you’ll never believe this, but the first weapon used in the Revolution was a Snowball. Here’s how it happened” – and that’ll get them to focus because they’re asking the reasonable question about how that could possibly be. But on a lot of days, they’re not focused. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the shirt I’m wearing, but they’re just a little bit too scattered and won’t sit there, so I start maybe with a game show: “Ladies and gentlemen, the correct answer is A SNOWBALL. What is the question?”
I might get some silly answers, but I’ll tell them that we’re talking about early American history here, and they’ll focus. They’ll be into the gamey side of things, but they’ll hear it, they’ll remember it, and other details about the Boston Massacre will be bound up in what they remember. Or if they’re extra good, I might give them a writing task, to write an imagined story about the first weapon used in the Revolution.
They’ll think about the choice, some will go the obvious route, some will be creative, and when I tell them about the snowball, there will be extra resonance because they’ve spent so much time imagining what it might have been, and how it might have happened. Still, I have to roll with what they give me.
I’ll do a great job if they do a great job. I’m a great teacher if I ask the question that gets the great answer from one of my kids. That’s my bottom line, so I have to be listening hard all the time for that. It’s really much less a matter of skill, and much more a matter of being open to who these kids are and what they’re thinking and feeling.
The feeling piece is the most important of all. When they feel like I’m there with them, hearing them, in the same mood that they’re in, appreciating them, they’ll lower their anxieties, they’ll trust me and the group more, and they’ll take the big risk of sharing what they’re really thinking.
Things happen faster then, the thinking by the kids happens faster, because all the anxieties pull back a little and stop slowing down their thinking. Their answers to questions become a lot more interesting, and I start to feel less like the teacher making everything happen, and more like the lucky soul stuck in a room with these fascinating, engaging little creatures. I feel connected because they feel safe. The trust opens the doors for their thinking, and we fall away from the social roles of school, and into the heart-to-heart exchanges that really make me feel like I’m doing what I need to be doing with my life.
When I get my part of the job right, we’re all in that kind of connection. It won’t last long, in my experience, but a few minutes of being there in a day is more than any of us need for the glow to last, for the room to hold a feeling of that magic for a long, long time.”  – Middle School History Teacher, Birmingham Alabama.

Long-time residents of Los Angeles know all about June Gloom, the weeks in late spring when the sun dims, drizzling rain turns on and off, and you’d never know you were still in California. Students in our little school act in almost perfect contrast to the barometer – the sun hides, but they vibrate with the deep relief of school’s final days. Teachers find themselves stuck somewhere in between. Their own months off are coming closer and a year’s hard work is almost done. But the bittersweetness of the semester’s end is all too clear to many. They’ll miss their students, they’ll miss the school, and they’ll miss the feeling of doing a hard job well.

 
With a number of Advanced Placement courses on offer, our teachers face a distinct end-of-year challenge: the nation-wide AP exams all occur in May, and once they’re done it’s hard to keep the energy of the classroom high. The whole year’s curriculum has to be engaged before the AP exam – it’s basically a final exam on steroids. So what do you do in class in the weeks that follow? More than one game of Risk and more than one field trip to the basketball courts have been noticed. And then of course for the teachers who teach some AP courses and some others, the slack eases over into the non-AP courses. And once find ourselves just a week or two before the non-AP finals, and students start asking for review guides, and time to study in class. The final weeks risk becoming the least engaged, and least engaging, part of the year. Actual learning can exit the schoolroom all too early.

 

One principal I know has been working for years with all of the teachers at his school to keep them focused until the last day. Most already get it, and wouldn’t want to slack off for more than a celebratory day or two because they see the lost opportunity to do what they love to do. But some need encouragement, and one or two need even more than that. The principal can become frustrated when we talk about this, but frustrated in the most wonderful way. “I tell them,” he says, “that there’s something so precious they’re giving away when they don’t teach all the way through the year.” His face tells the story: he’s shocked. “Why would they miss the chance to teach? What on earth are they thinking?”

 
What they’re thinking – and what students can see and feel them thinking – turns out to matter a lot. Here’s a model of how many pretty good teachers teach. They organize their course materials, present coherent lectures, run well-thought-out discussions and give students a good amount of independent work to do. If some students are unmotivated, these typical teachers alternately become frustrated and wonder why the students don’t show more enthusiasm or discipline. Often they work hard to sell that enthusiasm or discipline to the students – to convince them that these are good ideas.

 
If you were sketching out the forces at work in the classroom, you’d have the teacher on one side of a sheet of paper, the students on another, and the subject and course content in between. The teacher takes a back seat to the substance of the work itself. And this is how we think about school too often – the primary relationships is between the student and what is being taught, while the relationship between the student and the teacher is secondary.

 
This is vital: there’s untapped magic in most classrooms that can be liberated by making that relationship between teacher and student primary, and letting the student’s connection with the course content follow instead of lead. It seems counterintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense when we look at how young people discover new ideas and make new commitments. More often than not, they begin with a relationship with a person they trust. They follow the person because doing new things – thinking new thoughts, becoming a new and different version of oneself – is frightening. Trust leads the way, the it’s much harder to learn to trust a book than it is to learn to trust a teacher.

In many successful classrooms, students encounter math, biology, or literature, and the teacher shapes and guides and evaluates that encounter without becoming the center of the classroom experience. Many of us have understood the wisdom of the positive “guide on the side” approach to learning, rather than the “sage on the stage” trap. We don’t want our classrooms to become a stage for how great we are as teachers – we want our classrooms to be more about our students. Often we need to get out of the way, to make more space for the students and books and the ideas.

 
Yet this more modest approach to teaching tends to work best when students are either already interested in the particular content in the class (“I just love math!”), or enter the room with enough discipline and external motivation to make the class work even if they don’t have much passion for the subject. Interestingly, these students will do well in most classrooms, with any of a wide range of techniques and any of a wide range of teachers, because they start the exchange great motivation.

 
But a lot of students don’t fit that model. They’re ambivalent, unmotivated, ready to do only the minimum required to get done with the strictures of school. For these students, motivation is the key. They don’t bring their own with them.

 
Most schools spend a lot of time getting students motivated – we dispense both carrots (high grades, special privileges, public praise), and sticks (low grades, threats of dismissal, embarrassment for poor performance). Meanwhile, that typical sketch of the forces in the classroom leaves out a major tool for changing the student’s motivation. With the teacher standing back, letting the curriculum speak in some ways for itself, the student is left with the usual reasons to love – or not love – algebra, or The Iliad, or the War of 1812. But if the chart shifts, and the student and the teacher connect more directly, with the teacher then leading the student to the subject, there’s a lot more room for magic to happen and the student’s motivation to leap up.
Try this experiment. Find a couple of typical middle- or high-school students. Ask what their favorite subjects are, and then ask why.

 

In my experience, about half the time, the first answer the student will offer has nothing to do with the subject, but everything to do with the teacher. Why do you love algebra? Because Miss Temes is amazing. Why is European history your favorite class this year? Because Mr. Franke is my favorite teacher. Why are you suddenly doing so well in music? Because Mr. Williams told me my sound is so good, I can get a big scholarship if I stick with it. (And here’s the real kicker: “I had no idea my sound was so good.”)

 
The big opportunity here is for the teacher to be a leader of individual students – to build a direct relationship of mutual trust and respect, and then to demonstrate passionate interest in the subject being taught. Through the relationship with the teacher – which in many ways must be in the foreground, not the background – the student learns to trust the teacher, and follow the teacher’s lead for personal reasons, specifically because of that relationship.

 
And then the teacher turns to the subject and essentially says, “Wow. This is great.” The student follows, and invests the subject with the interest and desire to succeed taken in part from that relationship with the teacher. Student and teacher connect and build trust – that creates more potential motivation for the student; it builds the fundamental readiness to be motivated. And then the teacher leads the student to the subject – now seeing the subject with greater interest and hoping to perform well as an act that will honor the relationship with the teacher. It’s personal, and it has to be real.

 
And that personal connection runs both ways. Jane Bluestein, a former Pittsburgh teacher, wrote this a few years ago:

“I would come this close to throwing in the towel when a child would uncharacteristically come to class prepared, make a positive behavioral change or help a classmate. I’d be sure I couldn’t make it through the day when someone would suddenly get subtraction or appear excited about a subject we were about to discuss. And just as I was about to give up, they’d finally sit still for a story or laugh at one of my jokes.” Former Pittsburgh teacher, visible writer and commentator on teaching.”

Ask students of almost any age what the worst possible outcome of a class can be, and many – perhaps most – will say, “They’ll laugh at me.” Students fear being embarrassed, looking foolish, and being cast our socially. They might worry too little about not learning what they’ve come to school to learn, but in almost all cases, students worry too much about being embarrassed.

 
Teachers can help by sometimes taking on the persona of the fool.

 
It’s true that many teachers fear being laughed at, too – the tricky social dynamics of the emotional world our students share can sometimes ensnare us as well. And most teachers, in my experience, want to seem smart and knowledgeable pretty much all the time. But the teacher who allows a class to see a mistake, who strikes the pose that invites a chuckle of derision, can open doors that many students need to have opened for them – even if they go along with the group in posing as the social judges who find all that is unfamiliar to be laughable.

 
Sometimes students laugh because teachers reveal their passions.

“I was talking about geometry,” one math teacher from Chicago told me some years ago, and I just decided on the spur of the moment to testify to how much I love math, how much I love geometry, how much I love angles. I knew the kids would find it odd, and I just got into being odd, like being the crazy old aunt. I spent a couple of minutes talking about why we need to think like mathematicians at least some of the time, why we have to find the answers to hard questions, about how there are angles to be found in every part of our lives – how finding the answer in an equation patiently, carefully, and understanding why an angle is the angle that it is, is like suddenly understanding someone you love, or seeing the hidden logic in the piece of music that fills an empty place for you – understanding that the music turns exactly here, exactly this way in relation to the other bends and turns that all come together to make it whole.
I heard the snickering, but I let myself just go on. I felt I needed to, and not really for self-expression because I wasn’t only speaking from my heart, I was playing a role. I understood that. I was showing them a kind of passion and broad thinking, connecting our work to some deeper and broader meanings, and I just knew in the moment that I was doing something very important. And some did laugh, and some left the class with that harsh high-school judgment and rejection in some nasty little comments, but some were excited, some were confused, and a whole bunch – even the ones who were too nervous not to seem nasty – they saw and heard something that I could tell was important to them.

What had they seen and heard? A teacher who was willing to look silly. Someone who cared enough about an idea that he was willing to be snickered at as the price of exploring and enjoying it. A person filled with passion. A teacher going on a journey without a clear ending in mind – truly setting out to follow a thought wherever it might lead. That risks being the fool, but a fool connected with ideas. A fool who embraces his own passions is not a bad thing to be. Far worse to be only what the crowd gives you permission to be.