What makes a good teacher Mike Baker from the BBC reports

For all of the millions of pounds invested in researching school effectiveness, and the thousands of hours spent by policy-makers reforming education systems, do we yet have a unanimous answer to this most important of questions: "what makes a good teacher?" read more

What makes a good teacher?

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.  ~Lily Tomlin as "Edith Ann"


The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called "truth."  ~Dan Rather


In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work.  It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.  ~Jacques Barzun


Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions.  ~Author Unknown


If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.  ~Donald D. Quinn


Modern cynics and skeptics... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.  ~John F. Kennedy


A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. ~Thomas Carruthers


Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.  ~Gail Godwin


A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.  ~Horace Mann


Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom.  To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.  ~Tracy Kidder


A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.  ~Henry Brooks Adams


A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others.  ~Author Unknown


The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.  He inspires self-distrust.  He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him.  He will have no disciple.  ~Amos Bronson Alcott


A good teacher is a master of simplification and an enemy of simplism.  ~Louis A. Berman