Open Letter to Teachers

 This is the second of a three-part series of open letters to the three most important stakeholders in our educational system: students, teachers, and parents.  All three of these groups play a vital role in the education of our children.

Dear Teachers,

       If students only knew how excited and anxious and thrilled and nervous and ... all teachers are as the first day of school approaches.  The first impression, the first lesson, the first assignment, the first words that a teacher utters on the first day of school--every second is precious.

       A teacher's role in the education of our nation's children is the most vital and influential component of our educational system. As a teacher, your abilities have more of an impact on student achievement than any other factor.  All of this importance (I know) puts a lot of pressure on you to do the best job possible everyday.


       And to add to these pressures--as you already know--teaching is a very difficult job.  Different students with different learning styles; some having good days and some having bad days ON THE SAME DAY; building positive relationships and teaching to the highest standards.  The demands on you are many.

       I want you to know how much I appreciate the work that you do.  The best of you strive to improve all of the time.  Teaching is the sort of profession that's hard to master.  There is always something more that you can do; more students that you can reach; better strategies that are more effective for more students.

       You also, at times, have to be the one who tells a student that he isn't reaching his potential--and I thank you for that too. We have to be honest with our students and we don't want them to have a false sense of accomplishment only to discover (perhaps in college) that they real do not have the abilities that they were told they had.

       I hope you will be a warm demander as a teacher this year.  That is, be the teacher with high standards who insists that students do their best everyday, and at the same time your students know that you care for them and will do everything you can to help them to achieve.  Students appreciate teachers who believe that they can be successful with difficult material.  Students don't want teachers who make everything easy and demand very little from them. This only tells the students that they aren't worth the effort to teach.  Help your students to engage in productive struggle in the classroom.

       To all of our great teachers, I hope you have the best school year ever!  We often say that our students are our future.  If this is true, than it is true that our teachers are the ones who shape our future.

Good Teachers Demand High Quality Performance from Their Students

       When you think about your favorite teacher, was he/she also your easiest teacher?  Was it the teacher that let you do whatever you wanted to do?  Was it the teacher that handed out grades like candy, but didn't care much about how much or how well you learned the course content?

       The pedagogical term "a warm demander" has existed within the teaching profession for quite a few years at this point (see Ed. Leadership article from 2008).  The term was coined by J. Kleinfeld in 1975.  It refers to a teaching personality that makes an emotional connection with students, but also expects high academic and behavioral results from students.  This teaching technique has been praised as being particularly effective for poor and minority students; students who have historically achieved at much lower rates than their middle-class, white peers.  (see Becoming Warm Demanders, Caring Teachers, and Warm Demander Pedagogy)

       A famous example of the warm-demander teacher is Jaime Escalante.  He taught Calculus in Los Angeles.  Many of his students were poor and struggled with mathematics.  His caring yet demanding personality helped his students to achieve great results.

       Some teachers would argue that their job is only to teach and not to develop caring relationships with their students.  But I would counter-argue that only a part of a teacher's job is to teach.  The more important part is to ensure that students are learning.  This, indeed, is the hard part of teaching.  There is no single teaching strategy that is effective for all students when it comes to ensuring that learning is taking place.  Instead, we have to look to our colleagues and look to research and look to best practices to find these most effective teaching strategies.

       We know that students respond better to those teachers that show a genuine interest in them.  Students want to make their teachers proud of them--especially the teachers that really care.  Teachers that that understand their content and do not understand the need to connect with their students, often see lower academic results from their students.  And teachers that are very caring and friendly with their students but demand only low-level skills (similarly) see low academic results.

       It takes both: Warm and Demanding.