What Makes a Great Teacher a Great Teacher in the 21st Century

Classrooms are not idle places. Sure, they may look bare in the bleary 7AM morn and eerily desolate come 7PM. But they are places full of spirits -- spirits of students and teachers past, present, and future.

Education doesn't happen because those rooms are filled, education happens because those spirits are fulfilled.

And those spirits are ever in flux between states of known and unknown. Even the occasionally insolent ones can turn on a dime and suddenly become stars given the right tools and proper motivation -- the knowledge not of encyclopedic histories and perfected answers, but of the courage and understanding of how to light one's own supernova.

And that brings my mind to experimentation and educational technology and what makes a great teacher a great teacher.

When it comes to educational technology, the great teacher isn't the one who merely uses technology in education. The great teacher is the one who experiments and who teaches the spirits within students to experiment. The great teacher doesn't follow the rules. The great teacher doesn't go along with the program. Like a gleeful hacker, the great teacher turns Twitter into a reference library, chat rooms into exit tickets, Skype-casts into global awareness sessions, Wikimedia into a living breathing history of human events, and Pandora into the clothes of sound that wrap around culture and keep us warm on darkest nights.

Great teachers don't follow corporations and their politik of textbooks and proprietary courseware to a best-of-all-worlds dead-end. Great teachers have read their Voltaire. They know a con when they see one.

Great teachers recognize that the real thrust of Web 2.0 is not in getting students to understand the material but in getting students to engage the hidden material within themselves and to thus have body and soul to tear into the heart of human content with such intellectual ferocity that the wolves and beasts both of moonlit night and boardroom conversation quake in the wake of a mighty woken mind.

And in this Digital Age -- an age that will see not the eternal content and themes of humanity disappear, but the methodologies and shrill mechanics of the bygone 20th century and its still-birthed assessment of the almighty bubble shrivel up and fade away -- great teachers will turn again like Socrates to the colluded crowd and in this, our "doomed fad", smile the smile of the blessed.