Fueling the Flame of Teaching: Reflecting on Great Teachers Who Inspire Us

Teaching is an art.  As we all know, teachers can affect our love or hatred of a subject.  A great teacher can instill within us a love of learning, a thirst for knowledge, and can encourage us to pursue areas of interest, take risks, and ask questions.  For most teachers, at some point, a teacher touched our lives in some way and inspired us to become life-long learners, and possibly even teachers ourselves.  Reflecting on what made these teachers of ours so great fuels the flame of our own teaching, reconnecting us with why we were inspired to teach in the first place.

For me, two of my high school teachers vividly stick out in my mind.  Although they have very different teaching styles, in their own ways, they both instilled within me a love of learning and created models for me of what it means to be a great teacher.

One of the toughest teachers I've ever had, Mrs. G held high expectations for all students in her 10th grade honors English class.  If you achieved a "B" or below on one of your papers, you were expected to revise it.  Revisions were optional for additional credit with a "B+".   Although frustrating when revisions needed to be made, I always wanted to achieve an "A" and for Mrs. G to be proud of my work.  She kept me motivated by first commenting on what I had done well in my papers.  By remarking on my strengths from paper to paper, she reinforced them for me-- making me continue to do them well.

When required to revise, Mrs. G gave constructive criticism that was specific, so I knew exactly what I needed to do.  My papers were always scored with a rubric, so I knew what I had done well, and for revisions, I could clearly see what changes needed to be made.  Mrs. G never expected us to perform a skill that we didn't know how to do and provided us with an appropriate amount of scaffolding.  For example, when she realized that the majority of the class was having difficulty writing transitional sentences between paragraphs in our essays, she displayed models on the overhead projector.  Mrs. G showed us various techniques on how to connect ideas from one paragraph to the next.  Then she expected us to try out these techniques when we went back to revise our own papers.

Mrs. G taught us how to be life-long learners, teaching us skills, strategies, and ways of thinking that we would be able to apply to our work in 11th grade, 12 grade, college, and beyond.  She taught us how to think, how to dig deeper  into character motivations, symbolism, and quotations.  Mrs. G gave us tools for organization-- she taught us how to use outlines and notecards to organize a ten page research project, tools that I continued to use throughout college and graduate school.  She taught us the power of reflecting on our work by having us create a portfolio at the end of the year, having us choose a written piece from each of the following categories and then writing about why we chose it.  (Important Piece,  Satisfying Piece,  Unsatisfying Piece, and Free Pick)

Mrs. G's influence did not stop at her classroom door.  As the faculty advisor of The ROAR, the art-literary magazine of which I was Co-Editor in-Chief during my senior year, Mrs. G supported our interests outside of the classroom as well.  Giving us pointers on how to select literary and art work, and giving us advice on effective layouts, she guided us through the process of putting together an art-lterary magazine.  Mrs. G showed us that she cared by supporting our endeavors and sharing her expertise and her time.

Mr. O was a different kind of teacher all together.  He had the superb ability of turning history on its head, in his American History AP class, in the best way possible!  Mr. O could bring even the most seemingly boring topics to life by developing creative assignments that were engaging and required us to really think, analyze, synthesize, and apply the material. Studying the process of how a bill becomes a law could have been dull and boring in the hands of a less capable teacher.  In Mr. O's class, we were each required to research a topic that we would want passed into a law and write a paper.  Then our classroom was transformed into the different branches of government, as our bills went through the process of becoming or not becoming laws.  While the process was pretty well replicated, the outcomes were not!  Within just one class session, we had banned animal testing for cosmetic purposes and legalized both prostitution and marijuana!

Mr. O also inspired us to analyze and think outside of the box by presenting assignments in unexpected ways.  For instance, for one assignment we were required to write about why the American Revolution was unjustified.  Another assignment became a murder mystery.  "Pretend Grover Cleveland was assassinated.  Make a chart that lists the prime suspects and their motivations.  Who do you think most likely did it?  Write a paper explaining why you chose the suspect and explain their motivations."

What was truly incredible was the effectiveness of Mr. O's teaching practices.  He told us at the beginning of the year that he did not believe in teaching to the AP test.  As a result, since I felt like I hadn't been preparing for the test all year, I decided not to study much for it.  I was pleasantly surprised on the day of the test on how well prepared I felt, being able to write quite knowledgeably about content we hadn't covered since October.   But the way that we had covered it, made the material stick in my brain.

What I have found to be most admirable about Mr. O was that after that year he decided not to teach the AP class anymore.  He decided that all students deserved high quality teachers, not just the honors students.  Instead, Mr. O decided to teach classes of students for whom school was more of a struggle, where learning was more challenging.  

Reflecting back on both Mrs. G and Mr. O, there are so many of their teaching practices that I try to use with my own students:

1.  Pointing out and reinforcing my students' strengths
2.  Having high expectations for all students
3.  Scaffolding assignments appropriately
4.  Using models
5.  Giving specific constructive criticism
6.  Teaching my students skills and strategies to help them become life-long learners
7.  Having my students reflect upon their work
8.  Supporting my students' interests and teaching to them when I can such as with calligraphy classes
9.  Making learning fun, while challenging at the same time

Working with students with a variety of different learning profiles and learning styles, I am constantly trying to find new ways and approaches of teaching information, skills, and strategies to students.  By presenting information in multiple ways, my goal is for all students to be able to access the information and engage with it meaningfully in their own way.  My hope is that when students engage with material in a variety of ways it will help make the learning stick for them, just like it did for me in Mr. O's class!  I also hope that they will continue to use the skills and strategies that they learn throughout their educational careers, as they become lifelong learners.


Questions to Ponder:  Who have been the great teachers in your life?   Why were they important to you?  What made them good teachers?  How have they influenced who you are as a teacher today?