Annals of Education: Most Likely to Succeed

After a long anecdote about how hard it is to predict the pro playing ability of college quarterbacks, this New Yorker article focuses on details that characterize effective teachers. While I was initially bored by the sports introduction, I ended up being fascinated by the play-by-play commentary of scenes from the classroom.

Another teacher walked over to a computer to do a PowerPoint presentation, only to realize that she hadn't turned it on. As she waited for it to boot up, the classroom slid into chaos.

Then there was the superstar--a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. "So let's see," he began, standing up at the blackboard. "Special right triangles. We're going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas." He drew two triangles. "Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can't, we'll all do it." He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn't easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can't, we'll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who'd evidently missed a few classes. "See what you can remember, Ben," the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: "I'm going to give you a way to get to it." He made a quick suggestion: "How about that?" Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. "That's all right!" He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson--the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer--he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further. -- Malcolm Gladwell