What Makes a Good Teacher Great?
This month we have been looking at how better teachers create better outcomes and opportunities for students. Therefore, we must ask ourselves: how can I become a better teacher? At Nord Anglia we pride ourselves on the quality of our teaching staff, and the level of professional development opportunities we offer; however, Azul Terronez, in the video below, highlights the differences between a good teacher and a great teacher.
So how did Azul reach this conclusion? He went to the source. Azul collected 26,000 different responses from students studying in the poorest through to elite private schools across the world. And what did he discover? We don’t ask students how we are performing, and the reason for this is that we are afraid to ask kids what they think, partially because we don’t think they will take it seriously.
"Great teachers eat apples"
A common response to Azul’s question may appear at first glance (as admittedly it did to Azul, too) to be absurd – the simple answer from a child that is hardly useful as a means of qualitative feedback! But let’s look a little deeper; these children are telling us something in their own, potentially decipherable language, and all we need to do is listen. Azul parallels this with something I am sure a lot of us can relate to, the language of teenagers. If you ask a child how their day was at school, they may respond with ‘fine’, which could be translated to mean uneventful (depending on the characteristics of the child, of course).; alternatively, they may respond with ‘okay’, which one parent may interpret as ‘something negative happened today’. You may be thinking that I am highlighting the obvious, but the key here is that we must understand children want us to understand them, they want us to think like they do but act like an adult.