The Master Teacher

I had an interesting parent/principal conference the other day concerning a child in our first grade who has been diagnosed with"sensory defensiveness," a neurological condition that affects the child's awareness of his surroundings and of physical sensation. Children with sensory defensiveness experience difficulty with movement in the classroom, or, perhaps better put, with controlling movement. The specific purposes of the conference were to apprise me of the boy's condition and to request that next year the child be palced with a teacher who could be sensitive to whatever issues might arise with the boy. More specifically, the parent wanted to know if I could place the boy with a teacher very much like his present teacher, whom she thought very highly of and with whom the boy worked quite well.

Curious about what it was about this teacher that the parent felt worked so well with her child, as well as what she thought her child needed in a teacher next year, I asked her, "What are the qualities of the teacher that you think would work best with your son?" Her response was immediate - that she be encouraging, supportive, firm but empathetic, and understanding.

I thought it was interesting that the parent said nothing about technical expertise or even familiarity with the issues attendant upon sensory defensiveness, which, of course, was the point of the meeting. I commented that I found her response quite interesting, and told her why, and I added that I would hope that the qualities she enumerated would be descriptive of all our teachers.

What occurs to me as significant about this parent's response to my questions is not that technical expertise is not important - teaching is, after all, a talent, an art (a performing art!), that in my experience relatively few people have been gifted with. It is also a science of sorts in that there are specific skills and techniques that make the art work more effectively. Technical expertise is very important indeed.

But although people can be born with the talent of teaching and can learn over the years all the techniques and skills needed to effectively communicate information, they still may not be great teachers because they lack those qualities that that parent noted.

Teaching, like athleticism, is an innate talent. You're either born with it or you're not. And, like athleticism, it's a rather rare talent. But it's one thing to be gifted with a talent, and even to spend years working on the skills and techniques to perfect that talent, and quite another thing to develop the attitudes that result in the optimum actualization of that talent. Talk to any coach and he/she will tell tales of gifted athletes who lacked 'heart' and never reached their potential.

Without that heart, no teacher will ever reach his/her potential either. But this teacher has it, which is why she is truly a Master Teacher.