Hiring time. What makes a great teacher?

Recruitment time again.  I am looking at around 100 applications for each role, and there are far too many strong candidates to speak with them all.  I am also keenly aware that the best teachers are not always the best CV-writers - modesty and humility are winning traits in the classroom, but perhaps not in job-seeking.

So what to look for?  Well, I always look back at my own teachers (I reckon I must have had more than 75) and think of the ones who transformed my life for the better; who did not just help me nail my exams, but who showed me (some even walked with me) into rooms of wonderful ideas that I had not even known existed.  I remember not those who had particular expertise in assessing my work against curriculum objectives, but those who appraised me, the 15 year old, and tried to help me live up to my potential.  When I recently asked my own students about the characteristics of their best teachers, they talked about the “ones who blow your mind” and I think they are reaching for the same idea, expressed in modern teenager-ese.

Most of all, what I’m looking for are teachers who can, simply by virtue of who they are, do what a great book does; awaken and feed a sense of possibility, and of promise.  Teacher who can move students not just to know more today, but to shape hearts and minds to want to know and understand more, across the arc of their time on this planet.  And to leave things a little better than when they found them.

Profound teaching, transformative teaching, does not, therefore, draw its essence from curriculum tools, or marking objectives, or even solely from effective and compelling pedagogy.  It comes, instead from a meeting of minds between teacher and student and from teachers' deep and serious commitment to the possibilities in every student.  Recruitment is, therefore, as much about finding teachers with the right disposition as anything else  - without it, one may convey knowledge, but little else.  As poet Kahil Gibran said: Work is love made visible…. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

References

Gibran, K. (1923) On work