How Many Teachers Had a Meaningful Impact on You?

Recently, during an administrative retreat, twenty-four administrators and I were asked to complete a simple task.  We were directed to reflect on the classroom instruction we received as children, beginning from kindergarten through our senior year of high school.  Within that time frame, we were to share with the rest of the group the total number of teachers that we felt had a meaningful impact on us in the classroom.  With no rubric for determining the number and no real criteria for defining “meaningful impact,” every person in the room shared their number.  The numbers ranged from three to seven.  Pause for dramatic effect and allow me to say that again, three to seven.

Do the math with me.  If you count your kindergarten teacher through your 5th grade teacher you’re sitting on a sub-total of six teachers right there.  Add in the teachers who instruct in art, music, PE, and other elementary school courses and your number may jump to ten or eleven based on whether or not those teachers taught you over multiple grade levels.  Move to the middle school and you’re looking at six or seven different teachers per year.  If you added in teachers from your high school years, you could be looking at eight to nine different teachers per year.  As a group, we estimated that the typical student would work with a minimum of 65 different teachers from kindergarten through high school.  However, we admitted that the number is probably higher.

How do you feel about the range of responses our group provided now?  What is your number?

Admittedly, there are times when I become distracted by simple statements that have a profound effect on me and I dwell on them.  In this case, the presentation had moved well beyond the topic at hand and I couldn’t let this concept go.  In my current role as the Executive Director of Human Resources, I oversee the evaluation of staff in our district.  I couldn’t help but connect the admittedly arbitrary number of teachers who had a meaningful impact on my education to the ratings that teachers receive for their performance in the classroom.  We all know that the data is pretty clear on the evaluation ratings that teachers earn in this country; the ratings are pretty high.  Yet, our group openly acknowledged that an overwhelming majority of the teachers who worked with us as children did not have a meaningful impact on us.

How could this be?  Shouldn’t every educator strive to have a meaningful impact on every child under their charge?  Shouldn’t this be something that we try to assess?  Before that takes places, shouldn’t we want to figure out how to measure meaningful impact?  I mean, as an adult, if I can take 30 seconds to reflect on the education I received and then share with my colleagues that five teachers had a meaningful impact on me, then shouldn’t I examine this a little further?

Without a doubt, the area in education that I am most passionate about is not instructional strategies.  Before you send my name into the education police and demand that my license be revoked, let me explain why.  Instructional strategies will always be secondary to the most important aspect of education in my mind; relationships.  I realized this truth as a teacher, reinforced it through mentoring as a team leader, evaluated and hired for it as a principal, and actively chase after it and try to model it as the director of human resources.

The creation of powerful relationships should be at the heart of the teacher’s work in the classroom.  Without it, to what degree does the teacher feel they are truly impacting their students with the instruction they provide?  Sure, material can be shared and students can respond with answering questions, completing homework and demonstrating growth through assessments.  Yet, I’m left wondering to what depth learning could be attained and retained if teachers routinely focused on the quality of the relationship they have with their students?  In my opinion, the amount of money educational systems spend on instructional strategies could be significantly reduced if we would put a little more money into helping our educators hone their relationship building skills.

Take a moment and think back to the number of teachers you had when I asked you the question, “how many teachers had a meaningful impact on you?”  What made those teachers different from the others who almost assuredly led you through over a hundred well-crafted lessons in any given year?  Was it the relationship that they had with you?

If you can’t remember the details of why you selected those teachers who had a meaningful impact on you, look carefully at the relationships in your workplace right now.  Is it at all possible that your level of effectiveness in your current employment is somehow linked to how well you relate not only to your coworkers but also your assistant principal, principal, and/or superintendent?

During interviews, I like to ask the following question, “This is yes or no question with an opportunity to explain why afterwards.  Without using the word respect, is it important if your students like you?”  I make sure I tell the candidates that they can’t use the word respect because they tend to avoid giving a yes or no answer and instead they explain why a respectful relationship is most important.

The answer I am looking for is that it is absolutely important that students like their teacher.  Students that relate well to their teachers and enjoy being in their classes do so because the teachers create an environment in which the students feel comfortable and ready to learn.  This has nothing to do with being a personal friend to a student.  However, it does mean that the teacher knows enough about their students to ensure that they enjoy learning in their classroom.  The end result is that these teachers have a profound impact on their students, the type of impact that students will remember well into their adulthood.  In fact, it’s the type of impact that experienced educators, sitting around a table with coffee mugs in hand, reflect on as they identify those who had the most meaningful impact on them.

Cutting edge instructional strategies, curriculum packages, and textbook adoptions never address this critical component.  If you don’t figure out how to relate to your students in an impactful way, the knowledge that you want to share with them just doesn’t have the effect it should.

And that, my friends, is “The Instructional Influence.”