#1 – The Power to Diagnosis from Experience – Like a golf or tennis pro who can watch a player’s swing and immediately know what’s going on, many expert teachers can watch a student struggling in class and quickly deduce the source of their problems. These experts don’t need a battery of diagnostic tests, formal observations, or meetings to know what steps need to be taken to remedy the situation.
#2 – The Power to Convey Information Concisely – Expert teachers engage students mentally by conveying information that is exceptionally clear and brief. Teachers want to get their students thinking and learning as quickly and as powerfully as is humanly possible.
#3 – The Power to Pose Challenges for Students That Are Just Right – Expert teachers create tasks that somehow magically match their students’ abilities. Teachers acquire this superpower by witnessing their students struggle to complete tasks of increasing difficulty and making adjustments.
#4 -The Power to Prevent Misunderstanding Before It Occurs – Expert teachers present numerous examples that allow students to observe patterns and anomalies, while supportively questioning students to discern if they truly understand.
#5 – The Power to Provide Precise and Timely Feedback – Expert teachers and coaches can briefly observe a student or athlete and utter a word, or a short phase, and seemingly magically correct what the person is doing. Teachers acquire this ability from years of interacting with students as they practice specific skills.
#6 – The Power to Connect, Organize, and Expand Student Thought – Expert teachers connect information together in ways that both frame and expand student thought. Each piece of information connects to what came before and after it and comes together into a coherent whole. These experts may cause students to understand a topic in a whole new way and are often the teacher students admire the most.
#7 – The Power to Assess Authentically and Expeditiously – Expert teachers authentically assess student knowledge without spending hours grading papers after school. They do this by focusing their evaluation on the parts of an assignment which they supervised in class, which are directly related to the lesson’s objectives, and which are likely to contain the most common mistakes.
#8 – The Power to See the Whole Classroom – When we were in school, we said the teacher had “eyes in the back of their head.” In reality, expert teachers monitor the room, constantly evaluating what behaviors to ignore and which require action.
#9 – The Power to Affect Student Behavior through Conversation – Expert teachers affect student behavior through brief conversations often conducted just outside the classroom. These conversations may be tough love, positive reinforcement, clarified instructions, or patient listening.
#10 – The Power to Turn a Classroom into a Team. – Expert teachers, like great coaches, cause their students to behave like teammates over and above their self-interests.
Expert teachers do not acquire their extraordinary abilities through formal professional development or higher-education degrees, they acquire their superpowers through years of leading the classroom. It is evident that many administrators, politicians, pundits, and taxpayers have little idea how much more an expert teacher brings to the classroom than a novice who they can hire for a fraction of the price. Hopefully, enumerating our many superpowers will make it obvious that expert teachers are vastly undervalued.
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