How the media image of the ‘great’ teacher hurts the real-life good teacher - The Washington Post

How the media image of the ‘great’ teacher hurts the real-life good teacher - The Washington Post

How the media image of the ‘great’ teacher hurts the real-life good teacher

This is the first of a five-part series on The Answer Sheet this week about the stories we tell about teaching. All of them will be written by Roxanna Elden, who combines 11 years of experience as a public-school teacher with a decade of speaking about education-related topics.

Her first book, the nonfiction “See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers,” is widely used for teacher training. Her debut novel, “Adequate Yearly Progress,” about a diverse group of educators in an urban high school, is on store shelves in wide distribution beginning this week.

By Roxanna Elden

Public debates about teaching often raise some version of this question: How do we figure out what great teachers do differently and then get other teachers to do it?

The why-can’t-every-teacher-be-more-like-this refrain has long been popular. Media stories about the Next Big Edu-Thing begin by presenting the educator who embodies the new trend, whose rapt students lean forward in their seats, or chatter with purpose in self-directed, project-based learning groups, or interact glitchlessly with their school’s new blended-lesson tech tools. Focusing on great teachers seems to be a win for everyone — certainly, it’s less fraught than having to debate what makes a bad teacher.

As someone who spent more than a decade at the front of a classroom, though, these stories didn’t exactly inspire me to new heights in my own pedagogy. In fact, on a bad day, stories starring super-teachers made me feel worse than tales trashing bad ones.

After all, I knew I didn’t fit the media stereotypes of terrible teachers: feet up on the desk, newspaper obscuring my face, tequila bottle hidden in a drawer. But why, I couldn’t help asking myself, was the real-life classroom in front of my tired eyes so much less . . . great than the ones in all those news stories?

When teachers start asking themselves this question, it’s often on a day that began at 5 a.m., while CONTINUE READING: How the media image of the ‘great’ teacher hurts the real-life good teacher - The Washington Post