What makes a master teacher? Current thinking among educators looks toward seven key characteristics. They are the following:
1. Create an atmosphere, environment and attitude to learn
2. Establish a reason to learn
3. Train students on how to learn
4. Inspire students to achieve
5. Establish responsibility for learning
6. Continuously check learning achievements
7. Celebrate new learning
While educators and politicians strive to instill these attributes in teachers and pre-service teachers by offering salary increases for continuing education as incentives and threatening the jobs of teachers whose students do not meet standardized test targets, perhaps we should consider the possibility that the answer to improving the quality of education lies in our past. It used to be that teachers could teach. They had goals and objectives to meet, but they were not forced to read a curriculum guide that does not allow for spontaneity or creativity. Young children used to be able to learn by exploring their environment. Today, kindergartners sit at a desk and complete worksheets all day. When they can’t sit still for the long periods between breaks, they get into trouble.
The following story is a personal reflection on what it was like to grow up in a home where our mother was a great teacher and how her expert modeling inspired my younger brother, Robert Meehan, to become a teacher as well.
captain kindergarten
A kindergarten classroom has a certain smell. A kind of white-paste book glue, pencil-wood, smells that just makes you want to learn something. My mom’s kindergarten classroom had that magical smell, along with the sound of a hive of productive bees and the warm feeling of acceptance, but that was just the beginning, just the stage where the magician put on his show.
My mom was a brilliant kindergarten teacher. The word “kindergarten” literally means “children’s garden” in German, and my mother was like a gardener who provided only the most fertile soil for her students’ cultivation. She nursed the seedlings until their young roots took deep root, providing a solid foundation for future growth.
Watching my mom work in her classroom was like a deckhand on a ship looking at the captain and realizing that he is looking at his own future. From then on, the deckhand moves through life with a specific purpose: to become a master at calling it that thing; grow and learn, and become like the admired captain. My mom was my captain and I was her sailor.
The 13th-century German legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is a “Grimm,” in fact, about a vengeful wizard who lures hundreds of children to their deaths with a siren’s song played on his flute. My mom was like a charitable version of the traditional piper. She used her experience playing the piano as a tool to help her kindergarten students learn. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he could play a little ditty on his piano, and his twenty-five young men, as if delighted, would follow the call, moving in unison: sometimes to the ABC mat to sit in a circle, awaiting their next address, sometimes to their next core activity: the playhouse, blocks, or sand and water table, and sometimes to work on math, handwriting, or reading; her movement guided by the notes. Her students quickly learned to love music, to love learning, and to love her teacher as well.
At least twice a year I would sit amongst a rapt audience watching their classes perform very funny and complex musicals where each child had a role. My mom would take her accompaniment position in front of her piano on the side of the stage, and maybe with a nod or a raise of an eyebrow at her students, she would start playing and her students would start singing. . . They would sing with all their hearts. Parents took pictures, chuckled and sometimes pointed or waved at their children. But most of all, they were just smiling proudly, grinning from ear to ear as they watched their kindergarten son blossom onstage.
My mom choreographed special moments like this for so many kindergartners and their parents. She directed and accompanied at least two major kindergarten musicals each school year for morning and afternoon classes for 26 years. Parents should be very grateful when they meet a teacher like my mom.
He also loved Winnie-the-Pooh; Anything to do with Winnie-the-Pooh! His room was adorned with large portraits of Christopher Robin and Eeyore, Tigger and Rabbit, Piglet and Owl, Kanga and Roo, but most of all… of course, Winnie-the-Pooh!
His students wrote letters to Pooh, sang songs about Pooh, and practiced writing POOH in his 6-year-old handwriting. My mom even dressed up as Winnie-the-Pooh for Halloween. She loved the pure, childlike innocence and genuine sense of wonder expressed by AA Milne’s beloved characters. She worked very hard to create that same warm and welcoming environment in her classroom for her kindergarten students each year.
However, as much as he loved Winnie-the-Pooh, he loved his students more. He loved children and especially loved watching them learn and grow. His nurturing instinct has always been very strong. For a time, when she was in her 20s and 30s, my mother even took in foster babies to give them the love and care they needed before they were provided with a permanent home. She loved those babies as if they were her own.
It has been several decades since I watched my mother nurture her students’ love of learning by using Winnie-the-Pooh characters and playing those seductive melodies on her piano that motivated children to learn like the Pied Piper. The deckhand has been a captain now for the better part of 25 years, and after all those years of working with hundreds of wonderful teachers in numerous school buildings, I have never come across another teacher so caring, so talented. , as tolerant, or as magical as my mom: the cultivator teacher of the children’s garden, the kindergarten. I feel very lucky to have spent time on her ship.
The American school system is drowning in a sea of ​​bureaucracy. All of the science points toward the importance of hands-on learning and learning in a natural environment, but the political movement, unsurprisingly, is geared toward fiscal prosperity under the guise of a plan to create master teachers.
The following are the federal highly qualified teacher regulations that apply to K-12 public school teachers of core academic subjects. To be considered highly qualified, a teacher must meet the following three requirements:
- Have at least a bachelor’s degree. The degree must be obtained from an accredited institution of higher education.
- Obtain full state certification either through a traditional or alternative route. Teachers who have had emergency, temporary, or provisional certification or licensing requirements waived are not considered highly qualified.
- Demonstrate subject matter competence in each of the academic subjects taught. Competence can be demonstrated in a number of ways, depending on whether teachers are new to the profession, experienced teachers, special education teachers, or rural teachers.
Nowhere in the provision does the federal government require the critical affective qualities of a teacher teacher. Qualities like being friendly and personable, having good interpersonal skills, being a good communicator, and being a good listener make the difference between a teacher who can connect with students and one who can’t connect with students. Students who connect learn. Students who don’t, don’t learn.
The keys to fixing the American educational system are not a mystery. They simply challenge the current status quo. Just like my brother, I am also very grateful that I had the opportunity to be raised by the top master teacher. Congratulations to all the master teachers who have influenced my life.
