One thing I love about teachers: the great ones want to learn from each other. A fascinating article recently came out in The Atlantic. “What Makes a Great Teacher?” seeks to answer that time honored question with data from Teach For America (TFA). It’s a powerful finding: great schools have great teachers. But so do lousy schools. In fact, we ought to be obsessed about teachers — not schools — in looking for the answers to our public education challenges.
So, what does make a great teacher, at least those whose students perform best among the over 7,000 TFA teachers? “Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully — for the next day or the year ahead — by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”
Funny thing, this sounds exactly like what we train our licensed Kindermusik teachers on during their Kindermusik Fundamentals course and as they grow in various Kindermusik Professional Development courses. Moreover, it is what we observe among our very best licensed educators. I’m proud to say Kindermusik licensed educators are provided extensive opportunities for in-service training and that their relicensure requires them to take full advantage.
Teach for America & Teach for Smile (Kindermusik)…birds of a feather!
-by Michael Dougherty, CEO of Kindermusik International