<p>Parents whose kids are in Teach for America and those who are in education might find this article interesting.</p>
<p>[What</a> Makes a Great Teacher? - The Atlantic (January/February 2010)](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching]What”>What Makes a Great Teacher? - The Atlantic)</p>
<p>I found the article a very worthwhile read - Atlantic Monthly often has thought-provoking coverage of education issues. I’ve forwarded it to my d, who is a 1st year TFA corps member, and I’ll be interested to see what she and her friends think of it.</p>
<p>Interesting that the author accepted TFA’s standards for measuring teacher performance so unhesitatingly, given that there’s lingering skepticism about the organization from more entrenched educational groups. But TFA certainly has measured teacher performance in every conceivable way, without political considerations, so I believe the data is certainly valuable and will be of great use.</p>
<p>I’m glad the article concentrated on an outstanding teacher who isn’t in TFA - this might keep readers from feeling as if they have to take sides. Cheers to Mr. Taylor, a great teacher, and congrats to his lucky students.</p>
<p>Very interesting article. Still, if you have a teachers who really knows the subject but talks in a monotone, the kids won’t learn. Get a teacher who is enthusiastic and lively and the kids learn more.</p>
<p>The article was fantastic and very true. I think teachers have way too much power. I’m a student(current senior) and I’ve had some fantasticly wondeful teachers making as much as truly terrible teachers. I don’t know what the answer is, but I do think there should be some incentives to teach well</p>
<p>I think the charisma of a teacher depends a bit on the level. My two sons had different AP Bio teachers. They were both good, but the younger one had a guy who did speak in a bit of a monotone. My son said he had to do origami in his class to stay awake, but he also said he was incredibly well organized, covered all the material and made everything easy to understand. He got a five on the exam.</p>
<p>I thought the article was interesting and in particular the question of charisma vs. getting the job done. I was a parent member of a committee to hire three new teachers for our school - and the biggest fight came over a young woman who had great charisma, but didn’t speak grammatical English. </p>
<p>I do think that a class where testing shows gains in grade level for most of the students is worth looking at. I understand that a child who starts way below grade level may not fully catch up - but you can compare progress over the course of the year at the very least. My younger son had a wonderful 2nd grade teacher. Every single kid who went through his class ended up above grade level by the end of the year. (And I know my kid was barely reading coming into his class.) He had the best results of any teacher in that grade. This came as no surprise to me, because year after year I saw his kids coming to our Reading is Fundamental distribution days. Year after year they came excited about reading - and in particular the social studies units they studied. They’d come down asking for more books about US colonial history to go with what they were doing in his class.</p>