A Good Teacher....Am I?

There are striking similarities about what good teachers say about teaching. On at least ten propositions, the contributors are in near or total agreement:

1. The teacher's main task is to guide students through the learning process, not to dispense information:
"Teaching is not about imparting information. Teaching is about giving students room to learn how to think for themselves." (Law)
". . . teaching is less a matter of professing than it is finding means for students to discover their own virtuousness." (Architecture)
". . . I am on hand not to argue positions or provide entertainment but to facilitate an encounter between texts and minds." (English)

2. The goal of teaching is to help students read, speak, write, and think critically—and to expect students to do these things:
". . . I see it as one of my prime duties as a scholar-teacher to stretch [students'] abilities, open their eyes, and require of them as much as I think they can produce." (Classics)
"The amount of information imparted in the classroom is less important than the dialogue we begin with our students, that collective intellectual enterprise in which we seek to foster critical thinking and experimentation with new ideas, in which we engage our students in that elusive pursuit of the truth, wherever it may lead." (History)

3. Learning is a "messy" process, and the search for truth and knowledge is open-ended:
"The very impossibility of ever arriving at an account of a tradition or of ways of looking for once and for all, the contingency of it all and yet the persistence of our attempts to do so is at the center of all my teaching." (Art History)
"In dealing with any really hard problem, most scholars will probably admit they do not know of a single right solution . . . Students should not be given the impression that they have arrived nowhere simply because no single right solution has been found." (Law)
"Just as in real life, my problems may have several answers. This irritates everyone; students want precise, tidy problems. But my job is to teach them how to take messy, vague questions and transform them into a precise model which can then be attacked." (Mathematics)

4. Good teachers love their subject matter:
"Here is my advice. Don't teach if you don't like the subject matter. If you love it, don't hide it. Wear your zeal on your sleeve, shout it, show it, sing it. The rest will take care of itself." (Economics)
"A short philosophy of teaching might be, 'Love your subject and convey that love; all else is secondary.'" (Physics)
". . . we have a unique power to make our classes come alive with the excitement of discovery and the love of creative learning that drive our own lives." (Chemistry)

5. Good research and good teaching go hand in hand. Students' engagement with the subject is enhanced by knowing about the teacher's own research, and the interaction with students often provides new insights into the research:
"My experience as a professor and as Chancellor contradicts the popular misconception that teaching and research conflict with one another. Exciting classes stimulate scholarship, and active research enriches teaching." (Mechanical Engineering)
"Presenting recent research in classes adds a sense that we are all still learning, not just reviewing knowledge, and student response has been enthusiastic." (Integrative Biology)
"The integration of research and teaching has been for me a two-way process. Not only have I involved students in my research and related my research to my teaching; I have also participated in and learned much from student research projects. Most of my work related to student research has been at the undergraduate level. I think undergraduate students are capable of doing original research and have encouraged them to participate in the advancement of knowledge." (Ethnic Studies)

6. The best teachers genuinely respect students and their intellectual capabilities:
"I insist upon taking students seriously—seriously enough to argue with them, seriously enough to snap their heads off if they cannot show me logical bases for their assertions, and seriously enough to retreat in open confusion when they disagree with me and show me I have in fact misunderstood the materials I have presented." (English)
"Few things can compete with the teaching of eager, talented, well-prepared and demanding students that crave, in fact, demand, precision and excellence . . . How lucky I really am." (Mechanical Engineering)

7. Good teachers are rarely satisfied with their teaching. They constantly evaluate and modify what they do:
"There is no room for complacency in teaching, and that's one of the things I love about it." (Environmental Science, Policy, and Management)
"At any given moment I may feel that I am not doing a good job in my courses, and feel my preparations are inadequate, or that I am giving students short shrift. I realize I have thought this about my teaching during every term of every year since I started to teach." (English)

8. Good teachers usually had good teachers, and they see themselves as passing on their own teachers' gifts to a new generation of students:
"As I watched my teacher think out loud, inviting us to think with him about the material, I suddenly got the point. Instead of trying to fit some new material into my scholarly bag of knowledge, or attempting to come up with a response, I allowed my teacher's passion, his sense of wonder, to inhabit me. That kind of experience is what I try to offer students in my teaching." (Economics)
"For many of us, it was the special things that happened with teachers that shaped our paths to success. My aim is to offer the best that I was served." (Psychology)

9. Good teachers treasure the small moments of discovery in the classroom and the more enduring effect they have on students' lives:
"But the true rewards, the point of it all, are those moments of insight when a student suddenly brightens with radiant excitement and says, 'Oh, now I get it!' and does 'get' something to which access had been blocked. A small miracle." (Political Science)
"Teachers live for moments . . . when realization glows like a cartoon lightbulb over a student's head." (Public Policy)
"I have watched students learn things I never knew while I was supposedly teaching them, and do things that may well be beyond my capabilities while I was supposedly directing their research. And I have watched them continue that performance for years after leaving Berkeley. There is an enormous satisfaction in that." (Materials Science and Mineral Engineering)

10. Good teachers do not see teaching as separate from other activities; rather, they see their lives as remarkably integrated:
"The activity of teaching seems to me particularly blessed, for it allows me to spend my time with what I love and gives a oneness to my life that students value—in the literal sense, appreciate. One might say that my business is my hobby—or that I have no hobbies. I am always working—or never working. Whatever the formulation, the result is a wholeness to one's intellectual, even one's physical life." (Music)
"Very few teachers can match their professional work and their classwork as near-perfectly as this. One of the great advantages of Berkeley, I believe, is that so many faculty members are able to lead intellectual lives as unified as mine." (Journalism)

Extracted from Office Educational Development, University of California, Berkeley