What Makes a Great Teacher?

What Makes a Great Teacher?

In this article they are discussing what makes a good teacher and there are many things that factor in being a good teacher.  They also discuss factors that prevent them from being a great teacher.  They tell many observations that they have made.  For example they have an example of a teacher and how they teach and what they believe is effective for teaching and then they have an example of a teacher that could use improvement to become a great teacher. They are doing this to help teachers to become great teachers and what solutions they can use to help them.  One thing that interested me was when they said, "one great way that teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: are the kids- all of the kids- following what you are saying? Asking "does anyone have any questions?" does not work."  (What Makes a Great Teacher?)  I am surprised by this because all the teachers I have had always asked does anyone have any questions and I believe in this because I find that a lot of students are embarrassed to ask questions in front of the class. Another fact that surprises me in this article is how Mr.Taylor teaches.  For example, "Mr.Taylor begins to walk around the room reading problems aloud. "How many 5's are in 45?" The kids have to do the math in their head." This makes me think does he ever let the kids use calculators because through Middle school and High school teachers always gave me a calculator to use.  In this article I liked how they wrote examples of observations they saw in classrooms while teachers were teaching.  They went in detail on how teachers taught and they compared to teachers. I think this is a good article because it kept me interested and I could relate it to my education experience. The article also gave lots of good examples and evidence.