APRIL 2024 MAGAZINE

What Makes a Great Teacher?

Contributed by Laura Trujillo-Jenks, Ph.D.

A great teacher doesn’t know he/she is a great teacher. He/she seeks to perform his/her teaching duties well and with persistent excellence, and focuses on ensuring that the learning environment is welcoming, nurturing, and safe for productive learning to take place. Each great teacher also understands good teaching, meaning that he...

Timing is everything, in science just as much as in horseracing or playing the stock market. If Alfred Russell Wallace had published before Darwin, we would talk about Wallace’s Theory of Evolution today.

Between the growing environmental crisis, extreme economic inequality and global poverty, a long list of social needs that are unfunded, or underfunded, and, not least, the dysfunctional or corrupt political regimes in many countries, our species is in genuine peril.  And it’s entirely a self-made crisis.  Yet this is precisely why there is reason for hope.