Imagine yourself as a school administrator about to conduct a classroom observation of a middle school math teacher. Here's what you would see upon entering the classroom:
Long tables serve as desks, set up in rows. They all face the front of the room. All but one student are sitting in chairs tucked snugly under the tables. The lone exception sits at a table in the back of the classroom. (This student has been 'benched' for not bringing in homework.) The class is listening to the animated instruction of the teacher. At one point in his presentation he pauses and walks over to a student whose chair is quite a bit farther from the table than the others. He firmly scoots the student closer to the table.
In "Who's That Teacher?," author Gary Waddell asserts that the teacher described above and any other teacher could be categorized along two axes, one describing whether teachers know their stuff and the other whether teachers know their students. According to Waddell, who designed the taxonomy to help districts and principals assess the professional development needs of their teachers, teachers at the far end of the first axis are serious and achievement-focused, but tend to have cold, businesslike classrooms. They're devoid of culturally responsive instruction, meaning that they don't tailor it to fit students' ethnic or racial identities. Those at the far end of the second axis are warm nurturers. They're bonded with their students, but tend to be a little fuzzy on academic goals.
By Waddell's measures, that math teacher is an odd duck in need of fixing, even though his students seem so engaged and they consistently perform so well. He's hanging too far out on the end of that "know their stuff" axis, seemingly too focused on order and academics to the exclusion of all else. Why not help him to be more nurturing? How could it hurt?
What's wrong with this prescription is its failure to appreciate that moderation in teaching instruction isn't necessarily what's best for kids, to say nothing of quirky teachers. The classroom we've described is one straight out of a KIPP ("Knowledge is Power Program") school, part of a charter school network with peerless success in generating achievement gains in disadvantaged students. The observed teacher would be designated a "master teacher" by any measure of student performance, including their attentiveness in class. If his classification is a little muddled in Waddell's taxonomy and it doesn't capture what makes him masterful, it's the taxonomy that's flawed, not the teacher.
The most visible difference between schools such as KIPP and many other public schools is that their teachers dare to tackle character and values, which they believe requires unflagging attention to the nuts and bolts of classroom behavior. (There are other important differences, but they wouldn't be as visible in a classroom observation.) In turn, the willingness of a teacher to tackle character, as represented by his insistence that students sit properly at their desks and do their homework without fail, is part of the dimension of their professional make-up that Waddell doesn't capture.
Who does capture it is Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America and a relentless student of what makes a good teacher. In a recent interview, she observes that her more successful corps members appear to share a quality described as "perseverance, or what we would call internal locus of control." This suggests a possible third axis to fill-out Waddell's incomplete taxonomy: knowing no limits.
Waddell's nice and neat two-axis approach might be just fine in a school with only run-of-the-mill academic challenges, but Kopp's refinement is what it takes to designate a master teacher where the academic rubber meets the road. Can perseverance and an internal locus of control be boosted by professional development? Perhaps not, but merely by reinforcing those teachers who do have it--such reinforcement is a rare thing in the typical school, as the KIPP founders and other can attest--we might see more teachers who are masterful in all three important dimensions.