- Made sure that students did their work.
- Controlled the classroom.
- Were willing to help students whenever and however the students wanted help.
- Explained assignments and content clearly.
- Varied the classroom routine.
- Took the time to get to know the students and their circumstances.
Significantly, students did not confuse teachers' personal qualities with their professional ones. Inter-viewees described “mean” good teachers and “mean” bad teachers; “funny” good teachers and “funny” bad teachers; and “boring” good teachers and “boring” bad teachers. If a teacher had the six qualities that students identified as those of a good teacher, then demeanor, sense of humor, and charisma—as well as any other personal characteristic—were unimportant.
Interviewing Students About Reform Efforts
In an effort to include students' voices in education reform efforts being implemented in Philadelphia, we interviewed inner-city middle schoolers annually for three years while their schools were undergoing a districtwide reform known as Children Achieving. The adolescents, selected to reflect a range of attendance and achievement patterns, attended six of the lowest-income schools in the city. Each year, we asked them to talk about their daily instructional routines, the classes in which they learned the most and least (and behaved the best and worst), how they preferred to learn and which classes accommodated this preference, what they thought good teaching was, and where in their schedules they encountered it. We hoped to discover through these conversations whether school reforms had actually changed the educational experiences of students.
We also followed many of the same students into high school. In a serendipitous occurrence, several of the middle schools fed into high schools that had adopted the Johns Hopkins Talent Development Model. Because of this fortunate timing, we were able to get students' descriptions of their high school experiences before and during this reform.
Throughout the years that the students talked with us, they held fast to their view that good teaching was central to the quality of their schooling experiences. Moreover, when they talked about the value of education reforms (specifically, the Talent Development Model's block schedule), they judged such reforms on the basis of their effects on teacher behavior that aided student learning.
What Is a Good Teacher?
Students repeatedly invoked the six qualities of good teaching in answering almost any question we asked. Students talked approvingly about “strict” teachers—those who pushed students to complete their assignments and maintained an orderly classroom. Students added that good teachers were willing to help, explained assignments and content clearly, varied classroom activities, and tried to understand students.
Good Teachers Push Students
These urban students admitted that their default response to most assignments was to ignore them, which understandably gave the impression that they cared little about learning. Nevertheless, students liked teachers who successfully combated this habit. As two students explained (in their words and syntax),I like the ones that don't allow excuses. It's my turn to get an education. I need to have someone to tell me when I'm tired and don't feel like doing the work that I should do it anyway.If they don't keep after you, you'll slide and never do the work. You just won't learn nothing if they don't stay on you.
Teachers “nagged” students in many ways—by consistently checking homework, offering quiet individual reminders, giving rewards, and calling parents. As one student boasted, “He keeps pressing me until I get it right.”
Good Teachers Maintain Order
According to students, their teachers varied tremendously in how well they were able to control students, and the ones who could not maintain control bothered them a lot. As one student succinctly explained,The kids don't do the work. The teacher is hollering and screaming, “Do your work and sit down!” This makes the ones that want to learn go slower. It makes your grade sink down. It just messes it up for you. The teacher is trying to handle everybody and can't.
Another student pointed out the difference between strict and not-so-strict teachers:Teachers that just let you do what you want, they don't get a point across. Strict teachers get the point across.
And, as was typical of almost everything students had to say about good teaching, everything came back to whether they learned:I want a teacher strict enough for me to learn.
Good Teachers Are Willing to Help
Just as research has demonstrated that students have different learning styles, the students we interviewed had different helping styles. Some wanted help after school, some during class, some individually, some through working with peers, some through whole-class question-and-answer sessions, and some without ever having to acknowledge to anyone that they needed it. Being omnisciently adept at knowing how and when to offer help was an indelible part of being a good teacher.A good teacher takes time out to see if all the kids have what they're talking about and cares about how they're doing and will see if they need help.
Teachers who offered generous help often hooked students who previously had been reluctant classroom participants into working.One boy in the class, he do all his work now. If it wasn't for my teacher, he wouldn't do nothing. At the beginning of the year, he don't do nothing; now he does. . . . [It's] 'cause the teacher took time out to help him and talk to him.
Teacher help also broke the cycle of failure that we heard about from so many students. One of them explained this phenomenon and the role of teacher assistance in ameliorating it:Say, for instance, I didn't come to school. The next day I came in, they went over something new. There wouldn't be like time to show me what they did [the previous day]. And the teacher wouldn't make sure I understood. So, I start moving with them, but I be behind. They should have given extra help. . . . They could pull me to the side and ask me if I want to do it. Then it would be my choice.
Good Teachers Explain Until Everyone Understands
Many students complained about teachers who moved too fast through material or explained it only once and in one way. They much preferred to have teachers who stayed on an assignment until everyone understood, who offered multiple and repeated explanations, and who, as one student said, “feed it into our head real good; they do it step-by-step and they break it down.”
Students seemed most disturbed by teachers who allowed discipline problems to affect the quality of their explanations. For example, many students referred to teachers who would say a variant of “I've already told you this; you should have listened the first time” in response to repeated requests for clarification. Although the teachers may have been justified in feeling frustrated at the lack of attention that prompted the requests, to students this phrase meant “I refuse to teach you.”
By contrast, students' faces brightened considerably when they were able to say something like the following:The teachers are real at ease. They take the time, you know, go step-by-step. We learn it more. It seems like they got the time to explain it all. We don't have to leave anyone behind.
Good Teachers Vary Classroom Activities
Different activities appealed to different students. Students' preferences included working in groups, listening to the teacher talk, reading from a book, doing worksheets, participating in whole-class discussions, and doing hands-on activities. However, students agreed that learning was the primary reason for liking a certain approach, as the following three statements illustrate:I prefer working in groups. You have more fun and you learn at the same time. You learn quickly. So, you have fun and you do the work.My favorite subject is math because she made our work into a game and I caught on real fast doing it that way.I prefer to work by myself because most people don't read on the same level. I don't like to listen to others read. I might be ahead or behind where they are, whatever the case may be.
Good Teachers Try to Understand Students
Students applauded teachers who did more than just teach content to them. They especially appreciated teachers who made the effort to see beyond students' behavior and understand who they really were. One student explained:I heard teachers talking about people, saying “Those kids can't do nothing.” Kids want teachers who believe in them.
Students particularly valued teachers who recognized the possibility that students' misbehavior was not automatically targeted at the teachers.Sometimes a teacher don't understand what people go through. They need to have compassion. A teacher who can relate to students will know when something's going on with them. If like the student don't do work or don't understand, the teacher will spend a lot of time with them.
Good Teaching = More Learning
Students clearly expressed the belief that good teaching was important because it made them learn better. Understand that when they said “better,” students sometimes meant that they learned “something.” Unfortunately, it was not unusual for these students to spend a semester or an entire year in a core subject in which they learned nothing, most often because they experienced a revolving door of substitutes or a new teacher who was not equipped to meet the challenges of an urban environment. Indeed, one student's advice to an early-career teacher was, “She should quit this job—it's too hard for her.”
Students defined learning “better” as “getting the work right,” “understanding something that a teacher already tried to teach,” and “getting stuff we haven't had before.” Despite the lack of definitional sophistication, students voiced no doubt about doing better in some teachers' classrooms than in others.
And because they cared about learning, it mattered greatly to students how often they encountered good teachers. Nearly every student in all six Philadelphia middle schools could identify a teacher whom they considered to be good; and nearly every one could describe a classroom situation where little learning, if any, took place.
Students' Views on School Reforms
Because good teachers were central in determining students' school experiences, these same students judged the changes that adults implemented in their schools on the basis of whether the reforms increased the number of good teachers. Students were keenly adept at evaluating the effects of significant instructional changes that had been made in their schools in terms of whether these changes promoted better teaching and, by extension, learning.
In that respect, therefore, the students tended to adopt the kind of single-minded, uncomplicated focus on improved school and classroom practices that the experts frequently urge education stakeholders to use when making strategic decisions. An illustration of how students perceived the value of one such change occurred after our original middle school students had moved on to two high schools that adopted a block schedule.
The Block Schedule
The students we had talked to in the middle school project were in the 10th grade when their schools became Talent Development High Schools and switched all of the grades from the traditional seven-period day to a block schedule in which students took four classes each semester, with 80–90 minutes devoted to each class. They saw a difference between their 9th grade and 10th grade experiences. Time seemed to be the theme that ran through many of their comparisons:Teachers last year wouldn't take as much time to help you.Now the teachers take time with you, and let you know what's got to be done.
Students predictably complained about the length of the classes with this new arrangement. Class got boring, they said—they had to sit too long, and sometimes the teachers talked forever. However, when we asked whether they preferred seven periods to four, 107 out of 148 9th and 10th graders said that they wanted the latter. Of the 41 who did not, six were neutral, and not a single student said that he or she learned better in the shorter classes. Even as they rolled their eyes about the tedium of having to be with one teacher for so long, the students explained their almost reluctant endorsements of the block schedule:There is more time for the teachers to help you. They can explain the work. We get to also work in groups and if I don't understand, someone else can help me.You learn more with just four classes because the teacher has a longer time to explain it right.We get to do more things. We get to work by ourselves, we get to work together, and we get to go over the work more.I become more focused. With more classes, oh God, it drove me crazy.You can build a relationship with the teacher. We can have more one-on-one interaction.
Readily available help . . . good explanations . . . variety . . . focused attention . . . closer student-teacher relationships—the block schedule, students felt, had almost single-handedly created a school full of good teachers! In spite of students' complaints about the “boredom” of longer class periods, the implementation of block scheduling had changed teachers' behaviors to correspond more closely with students' notions of good teaching—and that result alone was enough reason for students to support the reform.
Students Do Care
The block schedule has been the subject of intensive debates. Adults argue passionately, relying on research that cannot conclusively bolster either side. Our students exhibited much more single-mindedness in deciding that they supported this change. Unlike adults, they did not raise financial, political, occupational, legal, bureaucratic, or philosophical reasons why something that promoted student learning was nevertheless inadvisable. All that the Philadelphia high school students knew was that with the advent of longer classes, their teachers had changed. Instead of telling the students something once and leaving it up to them to choose to work or not, the teachers prodded, aided, and clarified more. And, over time, students noticed the true benefit of this development—they learned better.
When adults ask what they can do to make students care more about learning, their question implies that students do not care enough now. Adults, quite understandably, allow scowls, yawns, misbehavior, disrespect, and refusal to work to persuade them that apathy is rampant.
But our interviews with students in high-poverty schools suggest that these adolescents do care. The students we talked with cared so deeply about having good teachers that they wholeheartedly embraced a reform about which many adults are deeply divided. Students simply wanted good teachers because such teachers made them learn—often in spite of themselves.
Do students care about learning? Perhaps the question we should be asking is What can schools do to support and reinforce adult actions that demonstrate to students that the adults care as much about learning as the students do? The students' definitions of good teaching provide an excellent starting point for identifying just what those actions might look like.
