Business Journal Op-Ed

Great Teachers

America’s colleges and universities are conferring approximately two million degrees this spring, marking the end of another academic year. And amidst the pomp and circumstance, graduating seniors are reflecting on cherished student-teacher relationships and sharing praise with beloved faculty members.

During commencement exercises at Guilford College, adult student John Allred lauded faculty, saying, “You are more than masters of the podium or experts in theory. You inspire us to learn. You encourage our dialogue that not only engages our hearts and souls, but also exposes our minds to new horizons. Just when our wells of creativity seem to be running dry, you flood us with dedication. You’re more than instructors; you’ve become our heroes.” I only hope John shared those remarks with his teachers in the weeks leading up to the posting of final grades.

I have the dual role of president and professor of political science at Guilford, and I returned to the classroom to teach public policy and administration to a class of 23 students this semester. I’ve always enjoyed teaching, and I prefer the term teacher to any administrative title I’ve held. I’ve been blessed with the ability to strike a good rapport with students of all ages and backgrounds.

Once, when I was teaching a graduate course at Harvard, I noticed as I walked back and forth in front of the room and up and down the aisles that my students were making check marks in their notebooks. At the end of class, a couple of students stood up and cheered. It turned out that the class had a pool on how many laps I would make around the room, and the cheering students were the winners.

Tom Cronin, president of Whitman College (Wash.), and a political science professor in his own right, has written extensively about great teaching. He says, “The best of teachers have an uncanny ability to step outside themselves and become liberating forces in our lives. They teach with a joy and passion and intensity that are contagious. They push themselves just as they push their students, and in the end their courses become memorable learning experiences.”

Cronin adds: “Great teachers give us a sense not only of who they are, but more important, of who we are, and who we might become. They unlock our energies, our imaginations and our minds.”

Carolyn Beard Whitlow, a professor of English at Guilford since 1993 and recipient of Teaching Excellence Awards at the college in 1998 and 2001, describes the student-teacher relationship in her classroom this way: “I don’t come in as an authority. I come in as a student of my students. We re-vision everything. Every idea can be challenged.”

From my grade-school days through undergraduate and graduate school and with more than 30 years in the business of higher education teaching and administration, I’ve had the opportunity to observe many great teachers. Here are four qualities I believe they share in common:

Great teachers excel at prodding our energy and imagination.
They use a constellation of pedagogies to impart knowledge, transfer skills and change lives. Their quiver of teaching arrows ranges from lecturing sages on stage to in your face and on your back discussion leaders. They insist that learning can take place between students in all parts of the room and not just from the instructor up front.
They challenge our assumptions. They ask good questions, assign tough papers and problems, argue with scholarship and data rather than only authority, engage our attitudes as well as our abilities, and dare us to reconsider our most precious assumptions.
They share themselves as well as their subjects by revealing what brought them to this time and place where your lives connected.

Perhaps most importantly, great teachers also make great mentors. They move us to strive for excellence and grace under pressure. They inspire us, in the words that Robert F. Kennedy often used, not to see things as they are and say, “Why?” but to dream things that never were and say, “Why not?” As mentors, they insist that their students give back to others what their mentor has given them. “Pass it on” exemplifies their guidance. “Pay it forward” typifies their advice long before Kevin Spacey and Haley Osment made it a movie.

So, as the academic year ends and we all reflect on the positive impact teachers have had on our lives, let’s celebrate them as Handel wrote in word and song, “Blessing, and honour, glory, and power, be unto them.” Or do as the bumper sticker says, “Hug a teacher.”

This opinion-editorial was originally published in the Business Journal of the Greater Triad Area in May 2004.