What Does It Take To Be A Great Teacher?

We all have asked it: What does it take to be a really great teacher?

Well, this is a question that numerous teachers have asked themselves throughout the years as they evaluate their own aptitudes. The truth is that people who choose to become teachers are only truly great if they set their minds to it, and work hard each and every teaching day to improve. Their purpose is not perfection, but progression.

Since the start of this year, as part of a yearlong search to understand what it takes to be a great teacher, I began dropping by high school classrooms across New Jersey to observe great teaching in areas across the socioeconomic array, ranging from a poverty-stricken city in Camden to a privileged high school in Millburn. Despite major disparities in practices, qualities, and values, I was struck by the comprehension that all great teachers share five universal approaches. And ultimately, these approaches are anchored in the same state of being.

What all great teachers have in common is faith, not in religious terms but in terms of unyielding faith for someone or something, even in the absence of material substantiation. They have faith in their students. They have faith in the course of learning. And, they have faith in themselves. It is what elicits the five approaches I distinguished in great teachers:

1. Great teachers are skilled listeners.

Listening is not just sitting around hearing about a student’s troubles (although many teachers still do this). Rather than coming in with a pre-prepared learning schedule, great teachers initially listen attentively to the educational and individual needs of their students. This listening could be an assessment analysis or could entail an insightful understanding of and reverence for the lives and home customs of their students, whether they are susceptible kids in a deprived district or honored kids in an affluent area.

“Ms. Burgett wants to know me,” Sydney, a 17 year old student in Sarah Burgett’s 12th grade class at Lyndhurst High School in Lyndhurst, says. “At my old school, the teachers never talked to their students outside of class.”

2. Great teachers have a genuine outlook for their students.

Some great teachers I met are focused on standard-based teaching while others are not. But regardless of their thoughts and focuses, all great teachers have their own, genuine outlook of what they want for their students. Since they listen to their students, the outlook they have is their feedback to what their students require, not to a requirement of their own. This outlook does not have to be theoretical. For several teachers, mainly in skill-based topics, their outlook is mastery of a particular body of matter, which they consider priceless for their students. However, others vision unique traits: instilling a lifelong inquisitiveness or turning their students into lifelong readers.

3. Great teachers believe in their students’ potential.

When I say “potential,” I do not mean the belief that all students will go to college. In area like Alpine, because of the available widespread resources, college is foreseeable for most students before they’re even born, while in areas like the Special Education classroom of Newark, college is very unlikely for most students. What I mean by “potential” is that in all great teachers, I perceive a belief that the student in front of them is skilled to reach beyond what anyone might imagine possible. Great teachers understand that life could take surprising and impulsive turns. It’s due to that belief that they do not ever give up even on students who never seem to improve.

4. Great teachers are calm but determined pushers.

Remember in “Mean Girls” when math teacher Ms. Sharon Norbury says she’s “a pusher?” Great teachers never stop pushing their students regardless of how low or high their level and their protests or lack of concern. And great teachers stay remarkably calm. Even when irritated, they breathe and brush the moment off. They don’t seem to take anything personally because they trust their vision and their students’ potential.

5. Great teachers approach non-attachment to interim results.

When I say “non-attachment,” I do not mean a lack of interest. Great teachers are certainly interested in interim results, studying student work carefully and tracking their students’ improvement. However—and this is where they diverge drastically from average teachers—they do not invest emotionally in those outcomes or take them as support of accomplishment or failure. Great teachers take a much larger vision of learning. They perceive their lessons, and what their students discover from their lessons, as something they hope their students will bring with them for the rest of their lives.

“You sometimes feel that you’re fighting yourself,” Paul Lamberti, a teacher at Eastside High School in Paterson, says of the challenges of educating students in Special Education. “But I do see my kids turn it around because at the end of the day, although they might not recall what I taught them, they’ll remember that I cared about them on a primary level.”

This leads me to faith. Because at heart, all of these approaches are anchored in a faith in the effort itself, in the everyday practice of showing up and engaging in the challenge of learning with the students.

So, what does it take to be a really great teacher? Well, it takes diligence, respect, and enthusiasm. It takes passion and a love of learning for education and for the course material. It takes the desire to never give up and to make a difference in the lives of young people. But mostly, it takes the development of this faith, not just in students, but also in the process of learning and in ourselves.