What makes a good teacher?

Teachers can’t be made, or designed, or engineered. They make themselves. Teachers, to use a mechanical metaphor, auto-construct. In other words they make and constantly remake themselves throughout their professional lives. Sometimes reading a book in the summer holiday will stimulate change, or a conversation in a staff room, or, more rarely nowadays, staff training. But whatever the trigger, it is always the teacher who actively decides on change.

This might appear to be a rather obtuse first point to make, but I would suggest that it is the founding principle on which our discussion should begin. Sadly, most recent attempts to ‘make’ good teachers have approached them as if they were programmable drones, to be deployed in some horrific youth containment exercise. Ministers and their mandarins in Whitehall – and too many compliant teacher educators – have sought to develop teaching machines. In their managerial fantasy, these machines are activated by OfSTED’s pedagogical punch card, whose instructions, in case you didn’t  know, always read as follows: all teaching units must start by stating the learning objectives, this should be followed by Q&A, an activity combined with learning checks, and finally a plenary.

In the real world, good teachers rip up the punch card and get on with their job: engaging young minds in the wonders of culture. And they do this by exemplifying as individuals the critical intellectual spirit we hope the next generation will adopt. Those who follow teaching scripts handed down from on high can never be good teachers, as they are in fact pseudo-intellects, fakers and impostors, who are acting out, rather than embodying, cultural engagement. Students can easily spot a hypocrite.

However, none of this means that teachers should be left in intellectual isolation, or in subject ghettos. Teaching is necessarily an individual act, in which the teacher themselves is the medium of instruction, but education is social, and teachers have a great deal to learn from others. How should this be done?

Teaching is far more than a craft skill. It is a social, political and moral activity and therefore it has an ethic. It is a cultural transaction that assumes adult wisdom and children’s ignorance. Teaching, most typically, involves distinct subjects, and so pedagogues themselves need to know what a subject is and is not. Put all of this together and it becomes clear that all future teachers in fact require education. Training is not enough.

Providing all future teachers with an education in education itself will not guarantee good teaching, as individuals alone retain responsibility for their practice. But it can ensure that all teachers understand what education is and are fully aware of its cultural significance. For me, the best, and now neglected way of doing this is to introduce teachers to the great theorists of education, writers such as Paul Hirst, Michael Oakeshott and Brian Simon. This is what is missing from teacher-training today.

Educating the educators will not resolve all the problems schools face, but it just might light a few intellectual fires in the minds of next generation of teachers and this should encourage them to kindle similar fires in minds of the young.