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Ms. Clarke was a second grade student science teacher at my traditional elementary school. She was in her senior year at a teacher education college and did some of her student teaching with my class. I can't remember much about what she taught me, but I remember vividly how she made me feel. For one of our assignments Ms. Clarke had us put together a project on trees. My finished product was eight pages of leaf pressings, bits of bark and notes taken from The Ladybird Book of Trees identifying each item. Ms. Clarke praised my project and held it up as a model for my classmates. I was an average student at best, unused to positive scholastic recognition, and her acknowledgment just about made my year.
In a December New Yorker essay “Most Likely to Succeed,” Malcolm Gladwell describes how successful Heisman winning college quarterbacks do not inevitably become successful NFL quarterbacks. The spread offense run by many top college programs is not workable in the pros where the NFL defensive players are on average much faster than the average college player. NFL quarterbacks have to think on their feet faster than their college counterparts. According to Gladwell the NFL quarterback problem is that it’s a job where almost nothing you learn about the candidate before they start predicts how they will do once they are hired. Gladwell argues that schools have a similar quarterback problem. We all know that nothing matters more to a school than recruiting and retaining good teachers but the hitch, Gladwell says, is that no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.
Gladwell quotes research from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education to show that the most effective teachers have a high regard for student perspective, allow students some flexibility and offer high quality feedback. In summary, the best teachers are highly attentive to each individual in a group and skilled at offering positive reinforcement. These are not the skills taught in credentialing or educational programs where the emphasis is more on academic and cognitive requirements.
Our favored approach to hiring at Chandler has been to recruit candidates with prior teaching experience in independent schools. We also require candidates to teach a demonstration class and always ask our students for feedback afterwards.
When we have an opening at Chandler we always look for teachers with the motivational skills of a Ms. Clarke to complement a strong academic background, and if Mark Sanchez fails to succeed in the NFL he would appear to have the people skills and patience that we look for in a strong teaching candidate.
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