The Best Classroom Teachers I Ever Had: Models for Managers
As with just about everything else in life, the quality of teachers is probably structured by a Pareto distribution. About 20% of them are very good, about 60% of them are mediocre, and about 20% of them are just terrible.
I have long believed that students are good assessors of the quality of a teacher. Of course, we always face this problem: one size doesn't fit all. Teachers vary in quality. Students vary in quality. Classes vary in quality. Maturity varies in quality. So, the fit between a particular teacher and a particular student always has an element of uncertainty about it. If you ask a room full of students to state their opinions anonymously about the quality of a particular teacher, there will be a wide range of opinion.
At the college level, there are teacher-rating services on the Web. The biggie is Rate My Professors. It has an Alexa ranking higher than 1500 for USA traffic, which is very high. It has a lot of traffic. The larger the number of evaluators, the more likely the results will be statistically representative.
We had these rating systems as college students in the old days, but the services were informal. They also reflected the outlook and intellectual competence of the groups doing the assessing. Now, however, the rating services are pretty accurate, because a lot of students participate. People offer their personal testimonies and assessments. They also give some kind of a numerical ranking.
MEMORY LOSS
I only have the vaguest recollection of any of my teachers until I entered what used to be called junior high school, but which today is called middle school. I only recall one teacher's name, because it was odd: Mrs. England. She was my first-grade teacher.
The teacher I remember in elementary school was probably the most important teacher in my life. I was in the third grade. I do not remember her name. I remember that she was older, probably in her 60's. She was an old-school teacher in a new-school environment. It was in Southern California. She did not believe in progressive education. She taught phonics. That was my liberation from Dick and Jane. I will never forget it. I have only a handful of recollections about her, none of which had anything to do with teaching. But I do know that I learned to read well in her class. I was a good reader under the old system, but I did not have the technique of phonics. Phonics changed my life.
I remember bits and pieces about middle school, but I don't remember that any teacher who was particularly inspiring. High school was where they began sorting themselves out -- as did the students.
There was a particular teacher-training college in southern California. It no longer exists: Immaculate Heart College. It was a small Roman Catholic college, and it cranked out phenomenal teachers. They were all women. The school was founded in 1916, and it was shut down in 1981. It was the victim of a battle between liberals following in the tradition of Vatican II, and a local cardinal who was holding to the old-school approach to the vows of nuns. Nuns ran the college. They went liberal. He shut down the school.
The high school I attended first opened in 1953, as I recall, and I showed up in 1955. Somehow, the principal had figured out that Immaculate Heart College was a great place to recruit women just out of college, who would work for not much money, and who were really good teachers. I had one of them in Spanish for my first two years. She was a taskmaster. I had one of them in English in my junior year. In the year 2000, the national teacher of the year, also at my high school, was a graduate of that college. She had begun teaching at my high school in the fall of 1958. (The media always said 1967. I don't know why.) These were disciplined young women, and they expected hard work by students.
I had one high school teacher who was really spectacular, and his influence over my thinking was considerable: Wayne Roy. He got most students to talk. He made them write, at least if they wanted a grade above a C. We had to write two 15-page papers per term.
As an undergraduate, I had several good teachers, but the best one was an historian named Robert Hine. He was a specialist in the development of the American West. He was the best classroom teacher I ever had.
I had a few good teachers in graduate school. Robert Nisbet was one of them. He was extremely good in front of a large audience, for he was an excellent lecturer -- almost a spellbinder. He was very good in a graduate seminar. He was very good in an upper-division course.
The best lecturer I ever saw, day in and day out, was an economic historian, Roger Ransom.
With respect to a cost-benefit analysis based on the amount of work I had to do in relationship to the benefits I got out of the class, the best class I ever took was a graduate seminar in economic history taught by Hugh Aitken. He assigned just a couple of books to us, but I learned more in his seminar than I did in almost any other class. The key was discussion.
THE KEY SUCCESS INDICATOR: STUDENT OUTPUT
Hine was a master in undergraduate teaching. He had several remarkable abilities. First and foremost, he had the ability to get a lot of students to talk in the classroom. Somehow, he persuaded them to say something. He was able to get them discussing issues. This is not as easy as it seems. I speak from experience. I was a teaching assistant for three years as a graduate student. It is possible to get bright students or students with the ability to talk to contribute in class, but Hine had the ability to get people to talk who normally did not talk much in a classroom.
The other ability he had was this: he knew how much reading to assign. He pushed you to your limits, but never beyond your limits. There were teachers who loaded you down with a lot of books, but this did not work. Any student would make an assessment of whether his peers were likely to read all this material, and when he figured out that the teacher had assigned more than a good student was likely to be able to read and assess, an intelligent student started looking for shortcuts. On the other hand, if he assigned too little, there was a tendency to procrastinate. Students procrastinate. They figure that they can read it all towards the end of the semester, take an examination, and then promptly forget at least 80% or 90% of the material they crammed into their heads before the examination. The exception to this rule was Aitken. He used the books to generate ideas and discussion. Out of the discussion came the insights. But he was the only person I ever had in a classroom who possessed this ability.
Hine was a good lecturer. I took my first class from him in 1960. I took my final classroom him in 1963. I am operating from a fading memory. He was not a spectacular lecturer, but he did not put you to sleep. And, as I've said, he had the ability to draw students out in discussion. I don't recall that the discussions ever got too far off track, which is always the threat of opening a classroom to discussions. But it was his assessment of how many books to assign that impressed me most. You had to work hard in the class to get the reading done, because you knew that other students in the class were likely to read everything he assigned. There was a lot to read, but not too much to read.
In later years, he went blind. He then learned Braille. He typed note cards in Braille. He kept them in his jacket pocket. He would review his notes with these cards as he spoke. It is amazing that anyone could re-learn teaching techniques this late in life. Then he re-gained sight in one eye by means of an operation. He wrote a wonderful book on this: Second Sight.
MANAGEMENT
I think this ability, if more widely shared, would lead to much greater productivity in every area.
A boss who can assign tasks that require considerable effort, but which do not press people into levels of performance that most of them cannot attain, is going to be a successful boss. The slackers are eliminated, because they do not like the working environment. The super-achievers are going to achieve a great deal anyway, so they should not be models for the performance of the group as a whole. Again, this is common to every organization. You have to focus on the middle. But if you focus on the productive capacity of the people somewhere between the top 4% and the top 20%, your workers are likely to achieve much greater productivity.
That was what Hine did. I don't know how the bottom 80% fared, but those of us in the top 20% had to hustle to get our work done. His classes were well attended. They did not thin out after the first exam. So, somehow, he was able to communicate across the board to the very bright ones (4%), the reasonably bright ones (5% to 20%), and functional people in the bottom 80% (79% to 20%).
Output is more important than input. In a small seminar environment, where interaction is the key, and getting pushed by your peers is more important getting pushed by the manager, the model to use is Aitken's. We did not read much, but we had to be very sharp to participate in that seminar. We had to think very carefully about what little we read. This was a graduate seminar environment. A lot of screening had taken place before the seminar was assembled. That environment is not the normal environment. The normal environment is where there are too many people involved to expect discussion and interaction to be the primary motivating factors in productivity.
One of the reasons why the Japanese factory system has been so productive is this: they break the productive units into smaller groups. Under these circumstances, the Aitken model can work best. The motivation comes from the assessment by peers. Accountability is greater. But if you're talking about large group production, Hine's model is best. You want to get some interaction, but you have to pay attention to inputs. Where responsibility is more easily hidden in the group, then inputs are more likely to be the key to productivity than interaction.
If you can eliminate the slackers, you will probably be successful. Hine's reading assignments eliminated the slackers. When they read the reading list, they did not enroll.