Thought flows in terms of stories - stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best teachers are the best story tellers. We learn in the form of stories.
Frank Smith
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
John Dewey
Laurence Houseman once said, "A saint is one who makes goodness attractive." Surely, a great teacher does the same thing for education.
John Trimble
Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student'slife.
B.F. Skinner
The teachers who get "burned out" are not the ones who are constantly learning, which can be exhilarating, but those who feel they must stay in control and ahead of the students at all times.
Frank Smith
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "aparently ordinary" people to unusual effort. The tough proplem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.
K. Patricia Cross
Teachers who cannot keep students involved and excited for several hours in the classroom should not be there.
John Roueche
Teaching is the highest form of understanding.
Aristotle
We teach what we like to learn and the reason many people go into teaching is vicariously to reexperience the primary joy experienced the first time they learned something they loved.
Stephen Brookfield
The best learners... often make the worst teachers. They are, in a very real sense, perceptually challenged. They cannot imagine what it must be like to struggle to learn something that comes so naturally to them.
Stephen Brookfield 
TEACHING: the earth doesn't move every time, but when it does, what a RUSH!
Cameron Beatty
A good teacher is better than a spectacular teacher. Otherwise the teacher outshines the teachings.
The Tao of Teaching
Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is.
William Glasser
In what may as well be starkly labelled smug satisfaction, an amazing 94% [of college instructors] rate themselves as above average teachers, and 68% rank themselves in the top quarter of teaching performances.
K Patricia Cross

(from the Western Kentucky University collection)

For an even larger, sortable colletion (updated 3/17/03) go to
http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/quotes.htm

The Process of Teaching

Teaching = helping someone else learn.
L. Dee Fink
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.
Gail Godwin
The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.
Ellen Key, 1911
Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.
"Chinese proverb"
Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.
Confucius
Teaching is truth mediated by personality.
Phyllis Brooks
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
A. Bronson Alcott
Teaching is the achievement of shared meaning.
D.B. Gowin, 1981, Educating.
The secret of education is respecting the pupil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson


The Art of Teaching

It's not what is poured into a student that counts, but what is planted.
Linda Conway
A mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled.
Plutarch
Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
Alexander Pope
The vanity of teaching often tempteth a man to forget he is a blockhead.
George Savile


On Being a Teacher

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.
Albert Einstein
It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
H.L. Mencken
No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he himself believes to be of value.
Bertrand Russell
If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.
Donald D. Quinn


On the "Teacher"

Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!
Goethe
Students ratings collected a year apart from the same students correlated significantly, though the later ratings tended to rate the teacher as less effective than those collected at the end of the course.
John Centra
Only some 12% of a national sample of almost 400,000 teachers received less then average ratings from students.
John Centra

 

The most important knowledge teachers need to do good work is a knowledge of how students are experiencing learning and perceiving their teacher's actions.
Steven Brookfield


On Learning

What is "learning"?
"In its broadest sense, learning can be defined as a process of progressive change from ignorance to knowledge, from inability to competence, and from indifference to understanding....In much the same manner, instruction-or education-can be defined as the means by which we systematize the situations, conditions, tasks materials, and opportunities by which learners acquire new or different ways of thinking, feeling, and doing."
Cameron Fincher, "Learning Theory and Research," in Teaching and Learning in the College Classroom, edited by Kenneth A. Feldman and Michael Paulson, Ashe Reader Series, Needham, MA: Ginn Press, 1994.
"Most models [of learning] assume that the purpose of learning is to incorporate new information or skills into the learner's existing knowledge structure and to make that knowledge accessible. . . . Learning begins with the need for some motivation, an intention to learn. The learner must then concentrate attention on the important aspects of what is to be learned and differentiate them from noise in the environment. While those important aspects are being identified, the learner accesses the prior knowledge that already exists in memory, because a key to learning is connecting what is known to what is being learned. New information must be processed, structured, and connected in such a way as to be accessible in the future; this process is known as encoding. The deeper the processing of the information in terms of its underlying organization, the better the learning and later retrieval of that information. This processing requires active involvement . The learner must verify an understanding of the structure by receiving feedback, from the internal and external environments, on the encoding choices made.
Marilla Svinicki, Anastasia Hagen and Debra Meyer, "How Research on Learning Strengthens Instruction," in Teaching on Solid Ground, Robert Menges and Maryellen Weimer, Jossey-Bass, 1996.
"Learning is a social process that occurs through interpersonal interaction within a cooperative context. Individuals, working together, construct shared understandings and knowledge."
David Johnson, Roger Johnson and Karl Smith, Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom, Edina, MN: Interaction Book Co., 1991.
"Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience . . . was disparaged."
Henry A Giroux, Border Crossings, NY: Routledge, 1992.
"There is no difference between living and learning . . . it is impossible and misleading and harmful to think of them as being separate. Teaching is human communication and like all communication, elusive and difficult...we must be wary of the feeling that we know what we are doing in class. When we are most sure of what we are doing, we may be closest to being a bore."
John Holt, What Do I Do Monday? NY: Dutton, 1970.
"Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge. This an art very difficult to impart. We must beware of what I will call "inert ideas" that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized or tested or thrown into fresh combinations."
Alfred North Whitehead, Aims of Education and other Essays, NY: MacMillan, 1924.
"I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...[a conception of] education as the practice of freedom.... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created."
Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress, NY: Routledge, 1994.
"Learning is not so much an additive process, with new learning simply piling up on top of existing knowledge, as it is an active, dynamic process in which the connections are constantly changing and the structure reformatted."
K. Patricia Cross
I think we need to train up a new kind of educational leader [who] will need fundamental preparation in the humanities of education, those studies of history, philosophy and literature that will enable him to develop a clear and compelling vision of education and of its relation to American life. These latter studies have been under something of a cloud in recent decades because their immediate utility is difficult to demonstrate. But it is their ultimate utility, that really matters, for only as educators begin to think deeply about the ends of learning will the politics of popular education go beyond mere competition for dollars and cents and become what Plato realized it must ideally be--a constant reaching for the good society.
Cremin

 

Since there is no single set of abilities running throughout human nature, there is no single curriculum which all should undergo. Rather, the schools should teach everything that anyone is interested in learning.
John Dewey
Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
Ivan Illich
Memorization is what we resort to when what we are learning makes no sense.
Anonymous
It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.
Claude Bernard
Sometimes the last thing learners need is for their preferred learning style to be affirmed. Agreeing to let people learn only in a way that feels comfortable and familiar can restrict seriously their chance for development.
Steven Brookfield
A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
Thomas Szasz, 1973
"Students learn what they care about . . .," Stanford Ericksen has said, but Goethe knew something else: "In all things we learn only from those we love." Add to that Emerson's declaration: "the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil." and we have a formula something like this: "Students learn what they care about, from people they care about and who, they know, care about them . . ."
Barbara Harrell Carson, 1996, Thiry Years of Stories
The lasting measure of good teaching is what the individual student learns and carries away.
Barbara Harrell Carson, 1996, Thiry Years of Stories


On Education

Cognitive skills either exist in such profusion (through schooling) or are so easily developed on the job that they are not a criterion for hiring. Thus the education-related workers attributes that employers willingly pay for must be predominantly affective characteristics--personality traits, attitudes, modes of self-presentation and motivation.
H. Gintis
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
Mark Twain
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
OliverWendell Holmes Jr.
All education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth.
Alvin Toffler
The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth.
Erasmus
Our best chance for happiness is education.
Mark VanDorn
Information cannot replace education.
Imparato and Itarari
Two professions most notably regarded as filled with "nonlisteners" are medicine and education!
Earl Koile
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcom S. Forbes
Education is the ability to think clearly, act well in the world of work and to appreciate life.
Brigham Young
The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; To train it to the use of its own powers rather than to fill it with the accumulation of others.
Tryon Edwards

 

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token to save it from that ruin, which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. An education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their choice of undertaking something new, something unforseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
Hannah Arendt, Teaching as Leading
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought--that is being educated.
Edith Hamilton
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.
Robert Frost
The highest result of education is tolerance.
Helen Keller
Education is the art of making man ethical.
Georg Hegel, 1821
Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.
John Dewey
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey
Education today, more than ever before, must see clearly the dual objectives: Education for living andeducating for making a living.
James Mason Wood
What we must decide is perhaps how we are valuable, rather than how valuable we are.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
Friedrich Schlegel, 1798
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to an human soul.
Joseph Addison, 1711
How can we help students to understand that the tragedy of life is not death; the tragedy is to die with commitments undefined and convictions undeclared and service unfulfilled?
Vachel Lindsay
Life is what happens when you are making other plans.
John Lennon (1940-1980)
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Berenson Bernard
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant