What if all teachers were outstanding …

Most adults who have been successful in life can point to, on average, two teachers who made a significant impact on their life’s course. Most adults will have had between 30 and 50 teachers during their school careers so this implies that only 4 – 6% of teachers had this type of impact. Our own research supports this low figure and we call these teachers “outstanding teachers”. A closer look at such teachers indicates that they deliver superior academic results and they have few, if any, behavioural issues with their students.

When I started looking at the education system back in 2001 this was one of the things that really jumped out at me. I was interviewing teachers at a school and one of them clearly fell into the outstanding category – when you saw her around the school she was always surrounded by a gaggle of students who clearly loved to be with her, the principal confirmed that she delivered above average results – and she clearly loved to teach. One thing she said to me really struck a chord: “In my thirty years of teaching I have never had a discipline problem yet in this school there are two or three teachers whose sole objective on entering the class room is to survive to the end of the lesson”. I thought, how can we have practitioners of a defined body of knowledge performing at such extremes and, worse, no-one could tell me why!

The interesting thing is that it is often a single event or instance where these teachers had a major impact on us. The latest neuroscience research indicates why this might be the case. Say we are at a critical juncture in our lives, for example, we feel that we want to do something – break away from the norm – but we are not sure. An outstanding teacher provides us the confidence to make the choice and this confidence is powerfully impressed into our memories. Subsequently, when we have a similar decision to make – or we need to persist in the original decision against resistance – then that powerful emotion is recalled and it gives us the confidence to move ahead.

A key to being successful, then, is to get close to such teachers. We can see this happening when students choose subject options in years 9 or 10, they will often choose the subject based on the teacher giving it rather than on the subject itself. Schools often try to prevent this!
An obvious corollary to this is that the key to a successful school is to have a higher proportion of outstanding teachers than the average. Imagine a school where 50% of teachers were outstanding, rather than 5%.

Common characteristics of these teachers tend to be: “they listened to me”, “they believed I could succeed”, “they accepted me – they didn’t judge me, even when I made a mistake or did something wrong”, “they were passionate about their subject”.

Our own research, the basis of all our work, in fact, is that it is just these attitudes and behaviours that make the difference and, we now know, they can be learned. So teachers can learn to be outstanding.

What if our schools were set up for teachers to learn to be outstanding at the same time that they are teaching our children?

The Three Types of Change