Inspirational teacher training is a long-term route to making schools and universities more inspiring places. On the Renaissance philosopher Plutarch's view, after all, the mind's education isn't a vessel that needs filling, but it's a wood that needs igniting. Fire spreads, so to speak. So how to set teachers' minds on fire?
The answer to this question all depends on who you're asking. Oftentimes, teachers-in-training will respond with very specific and technical issues: Teachers need (1) a clear sense of purpose with (2) engaging processes in their chosen curriculum. What's more, teachers need (3) influence over the politics that make those curricula. Along with (4) the ability to blend and adapt different approaches to their given field as well as (5) an on-going habit of critical self-reflection on their own teaching.
So far, so good. As long as they maintain a passion for their teaching, most want to add.
Thing is, I have a more ambitious vision of teaching. I think Aristotle specifically has much to add to this conversation. Specifically, I think Aristotle's account of "practical wisdom" has a lot to add to the making of good teachers.
Aristotle's "practical wisdom" has, they say, three component parts. First there is episteme -- that theoretical knowledge and understanding of education itself. Second is techne, or the practical skill and technical competence in the classroom. Finally, there's phronesis -- the capacity to make judgements.
Judgement mattered to Aristotle, and so the ability of teachers to think for themselves matters here: Should students not strive to be at least as curious and imaginative as the best of their teachers? Should teachers not, as they would have their students, question the status quo, and draw on the past not to recreate it, but to reinvent the future?
If you agree that to be educated is to think critically in an informed way, as part of a long tradition of thinking (such as I do) -- long after you've forgotten what you learnt -- then generating teachers who think must be part of improving education overall. To love infecting others with a love of ideas is indeed the privilege of a happy teacher. In this the good teacher is, if nothing else, not a professional studded and embellished with qualifications, but primarily a thinker who makes their own judgements.
If teachers are not thinking -- about their lessons, their curriculum, their students, the priorities of their schools and universities, and the structures and policies which govern the idea of education at all levels -- then who on earth is? Not those they teach, for a start. Rote learning and teaching-to-the-test have never been known for starting forest fires in the imagination. To make good teachers, we must care about their autonomy, their enthusiasm, their resilience, and more prosaically -- and perhaps impossibly -- we might even have to care about their happiness: That is, in the end, their judgement that counts.
Aristotle would have us think again about how we engage with teaching as a profession, as an ideal and as a solution to educational failures. Teacher training matters, and intellectual arson matters, for fire does spread: If the teachers aren't burning, we shouldn't be all that surprised that their students aren't either.