What Great Teachers Have in Common
Happy new year! This post marks the second half of my search to learn about education by watching great teachers in the classroom. Four months in, with the opportunity to reflect, I’m realizing that despite my epiphany in October that great teachers are not alike, the teachers I’m following do share five common practices. And in the end, these practices are rooted in the same state of being.
Warning: I am about to drop the F-bomb. No, not the one you’re probably thinking of. I am going to drop even more fearsome F-bomb, a word so noxious and incendiary that I did not even want to use it in the title of this post.
That word is “faith.”
Wait—don’t block me from your inbox! First of all, I’m not referring to a religious faith. I have no idea whether the teachers I’m observing identify with any religion at all. For all I know, they’re all die-hard Satanists, though that does seem kind of unlikely. (But if it’s true,