5 Pillars of Great Teaching: Pillar 5 - Long-Term Focused

This post is part 6/7 of a series on How to Pick Good Teachers to Accelerate your Learning.

Pillar 5: Long-Term Focused

Great teachers are focused on long term outcomes for the students. They help students cultivate curiosity, creativity and a love for the learning process in their chosen discipline, so that students become aware of their progression and the barriers reaching their next level.

Teachers who are long term focused empower students to teach themselves, eventually rendering the teacher unnecessary.

Many teachers set their students up for failure in the long term by teaching with the objective of success in the short term. In school, examples of short term success would be teaching students to do well on tests, like the SATs, or to gain college admission. In the sporting world, this may be coaches teaching students tactics that work on low-skilled opponents in order to win an upcoming tournament (e.g openings traps in chess, stock arguments in debate), but would fail in the future against high-skilled opponents.

I saw this first hand, during my time as a Learning Consultant at Princeton. My job was to help other students design personalized strategies to help them achieve their academic goals. I consulted many freshmen and sophomores who came to me complaining of their struggles to adapt to the demands of academics in college. In many cases, the problem turned out to be that students didn’t understand how to prioritize topics in their classes and therefore didn’t understand which things were worth focusing on. It turns out that in high school, their classes had well defined syllabi and the teachers would tell them exactly what to focus on for the test.

Now, these students were good students --they managed to get into Princeton after all. However, they were brittle, as they had never encountered unstructured learning environments and were never forced to develop their own muscle of mapping the relative importance of topics and seeing how they fit together. Their high school teachers succeeded at doing their job of helping them get into college, but failed at developing them as independent learners. Fortunately, these students were self-aware enough to seek help, and many of them developed their own learning systems that served them well. 

Great teachers prepare students to be independent learners. I was fortunate to have one such great teacher during my time in college, Robert (Bob) Dondero. He embodied teaching for the long term and taught the most useful Computer Science class I took, called “Advanced Programming Systems”. He didn’t just focus on skills to pass the class, like syntax of programming languages or how to use a specific library or tool, but helped us see different ways of thinking around developing software, learning new technologies, language and tool selection and thinking in systems. Before his class, I was low in confidence around my programming abilities, from taking classes that moved too fast or were badly taught. However,  Professor Dondero’s patience and care, coupled with his long term focus on helping us become successful at building software for our own purposes -- whether it was for a career as a software engineer or just building side projects and MVPs -- rekindled my confidence in programming and building software.

Next, read about questions and methods to find good teachers: How to find the right teachers for us?

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