Attention, Class!!! 16 Ways to Be a Smarter Teacher

George Bernard Shaw could not have been more wrong when he coined the famous maxim, "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." In a fast-moving economy that is driven by ideas, an essential part of being a leader is being a good teacher.

How else do you persuade everyone in an organization -- whether that means 50 employees or 50,000 -- to move in the same direction? How do you refocus the staff around a scaled-down strategy to survive an economic slump? How do you ensure that people at every level understand the priorities of the moment? How do you develop the leaders of tomorrow?

Simple: You teach. That's different from giving a speech in a companywide meeting or giving orders to a subordinate. That's not teaching; that's dictating. Telling people what to do doesn't guarantee that they will learn enough to think for themselves in the future. Instead, it may mean that they'll depend on you or their superiors even more and that they will stop taking chances, stop innovating, stop learning.

What do great teachers do that you should be doing in your role as a leader? Read on. We consulted the people who know best: teachers themselves. All sorts of teachers. Some of them teach formally in classrooms. Some teach informally -- in their offices, during dinner, on the fly -- as they're running companies. Our experts have taught senior executives, software developers, sales reps, and MBA students, as well as middle-school students, musicians, surgeons, and other teachers.

Good teaching, it turns out, is universal. Whether the topic is a new-product launch, social studies, or a triple bypass, the same principles -- and many of the same techniques -- apply. Are you ready to learn? Grab a desk, and open your notebooks.

1. It's not about you; it's about them.

Some teachers see themselves as the designated expert whose role is to impart their knowledge to students who are empty vessels. That's the wrong metaphor, says William Rando, who has been training college-level teachers for 15 years. The best instructors see themselves as guides. They share what they know, but they understand that they are not the focus. Their students are.

"It's hard for some teachers to understand that teaching is really not about them," says Rando, who runs the Office of Teaching Fellow Preparation and Development at Yale University. "There's something counterintuitive about that. But it doesn't mean that you don't matter. It means that instead of asking, 'What am I going to do today?' you ask, 'What are my students going to do today?' "

2. Study your students.

It's not enough to know your material. You need to know the people you're teaching -- their talents, prior experience, and needs. Otherwise, how can you know for certain what they already know and what they need to learn? "I tell my teachers to imagine that someone called and said, 'I'm trying to get to Yale,' " says Rando. "The first question you have to ask is, 'Where are you?' You have to know where the person is starting from before you can help him reach the destination. It may sound obvious, but as teachers, we sometimes begin the journey and forget to ask our students, 'Where are you? Where are you starting from?' "

Yoheved Kaplinsky, chair of the piano department at the Juilliard School, pays attention to her students' self-awareness. "I want to see my students evaluate their own playing," she says. "That gives me an idea of how astute or delusional they are. You can listen between the lines and get a sense of their personality."

3. Students take risks when teachers create a safe environment.

Learning requires vulnerability, says Michele Forman, who teaches social studies at Middlebury Union High School in Middlebury, Vermont. Students have to acknowledge what they don't know, take risks, and rethink what they thought they knew. That can be an uncomfortable -- even scary -- situation for anyone. A little warmth goes a long way, says Forman, the 2001 National Teacher of the Year. Like having a couch and floor pillows in one corner of the classroom. Or decorating the walls with her students' work, because "it's their space." The result is a learning environment that is emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically safe.

"If they aren't feeling well, I make them a cup of peppermint tea. If they're hungry, I feed them," says Forman. "It can be the simplest thing, but it sends an important message." Students need to know that they can trust the instructor. Hence, another Forman rule: No sarcasm in the classroom. "It creates the fear that you're going to make them look bad," she says.