Bakers make bread. Teachers transmit knowledge.
One of the field’s age-old favorites is: What is a good teacher? Each time the question is raised, the debaters travel back to the B.C. era, take their positions on the dusty streets of Athens, and eloquently argue their visions and ideals. In Socratic fashion, the debate usually ends with everyone “agreeing to disagree” or finding themselves totally bewildered by the complexity of the topic. The outcome of this repetitive exercise almost always leads to the conclusion that goodness in teaching is either arbitrarily defined or unknown.
When UNESCO asked 500 students “What Makes a Good Teacher?” back in 1996, they received answers from around the world that ranged from smiling at pupils to being patient to starting and ending lessons on time. When Stanford education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond drafted a 1999 paper on teacher quality, she reviewed research findings on hypothesized “good” teacher qualities like subject-area knowledge, general