Alison Gopnik Quotes

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.

We expert teachers know that motivation and emotional impact are what matter.

I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education, I believe teachers are.

Any good teacher knows how important it is to connect with students and understand our culture.

The single most important thing in a child's performance is the quality of the teacher. Making sure a child spends the maximum amount of time with inspirational teachers is the most important thing.

The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of skin or where they come from. It is not who their parents are or how much money they have. It is who their teacher is.

Education is a business - the growth business. It cultivates the growth of our learners, translates the growth of new knowledge, and builds professional growth.

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

So what does a good teacher do? Create tension - but just the right amount.

This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.

The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

Excitement in education and student productivity, the ability to get a result that you want from students, go together and cannot be separated.

I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student - and not to a test.

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. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious. It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.

I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children. Some of the teachers were just doing their job, but others had that little extra. They really cared about children and they wore pretty dresses.

What we now call school training, the pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I could scarcely be said to have enjoyed.

One thing I'm hearing a lot is from teachers who have felt that there's something wrong with the extreme group learning, but felt like they couldn't say that out loud. And apparently the discussion is now opening up. I think change is going to be a long time coming.

Study after study affirms what I saw in the classroom every day as superintendent of Denver Public Schools: Nothing makes a bigger difference for student learning than great teaching.

I wasn't a very good teacher.

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

Scholarships that allow students to get a good education are important, but first we want to measure the progress that the schools are teaching our students, we want to hold them accountable for the progress, we want to hold the schools accountable for teaching the young people in America.

The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn when teachers themselves are taught to learn.

I've always felt that the obligation of teachers is to have a huge, broad overview and to provide a foundation course to the students. The long view of history is absolutely crucial.

That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil's means; great teachers foresee a pupil's ends.

Education in the past has been too much inspiration and too little information.