What makes a great teacher?

The Best Teachers Don’t Teach. Yes, you heard it right.

Amrut Dhumal, also the founder of Immerz, has been a teacher since 2004, graduating to running a school and then 40. Through all those years he has struggled to understand and then scale what it means to be a great teacher. The image he had in his mind of a great teacher is one who shows up to class and mesmerizes those in her charge by sharing her passion of Math (or History or English), uses cool aids to explain the topic and share her mastery of the topic at hand. Indeed he was one of those teachers and took great pride in being a great performer, one who managed to keep all those eyeballs glued to him and even get standing ovations on occasion. But when he looked at the data he saw that while the students in classrooms with teachers like him performed well, but there seemed to be another kind of classroom, led by a different kind of teacher that seemed to outperform by a mile.

In these classrooms one didn’t see a teacher taking center stage, in fact, you had to search for her and might find her sitting next to a student. In fact the more closely we looked we saw that these teachers don’t teach, not by the commonly accepted definition anyway. For that one has to at least stand-up and talk to the class in that familiar teacher's voice, but no they weren’t doing that. They weren’t explaining but they were doing something even more effective, they were provoking. Instead of sharing their mastery with the class they lay a trail of breadcrumbs down for the students so that each student would discover the key insight herself.

Discovering things, as it turns out, is hugely rewarding for kids (and adults) in fact the high students were getting, the Aha! Is rather a rather effective motivator in keeping them working, searching for the next one.

We have also tried to scale this quality of excellence through a learning application called Immerz. We would not teach the students Math but we would help them discover the key rules. Take Algebra for example:

We will not teach them that an equation means two sides balance but instead help them to impute what it takes to balance a scale. And then that the scale can be represented abstractly by a = sign. So the rules you learned for the scale should apply here too. And indeed, they do!

We can help them understand too that those dreaded word problems can be reduced to the balance or equation that they have mastered above

We will not spoon feed them rules on isolating x but have them try to get x all alone, see what happens and then leave them with a sense of pride for having cracked the puzzle

So instead of teaching the rules of algebra to your child or your student, you can help him discover it for himself/herself using Immerz. If you found this idea exciting do support our campaign to help bring the joy of discovery to kids around the world.

Immerz: Click Here To Help Your Child Fall In Love With Math