What Makes a Good Teacher?

By Richard P. Traina

At every level of education, there is a recurrent question: What constitutes good teaching? Some years ago, I embarked on an interesting bit of research in pursuit of an answer to that query. As a historian, I decided to explore the autobiographies of prominent Americans from the 19th and 20th centuries (some 125 of them). As these people--men and women of different social, economic, geographic, religious, and racial backgrounds--recounted their educational experiences, what did they have to say about...