Wendy Kopp Quotes

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

The best teachers are those who keep students motivated, challenged and flourishing.

As a former high school teacher and a student in a class of 60 urchins at St. Brigid's grammar school, I know that education is all about discipline and motivation. Disadvantaged students need extra attention, a stable school environment, and enough teacher creativity to stimulate their imaginations. Those things are not expensive.

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

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

When kids are met with the highest expectations and given the extra supports they need, they can be as motivated as kids anywhere.

Like most of the other teachers, I'd done a bit of teaching and we all think we're great at what we do, but you realize that normally you have an audience who are all onside, who all want to listen.

I was not a good teacher; I didn't have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else.

The greatest teachers are the ones that turn a B student into an A student, or a failing student into a B student.

What all good teachers have in common, however, is that they set high standards for their students and do not settle for anything less.

The most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision, maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

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.

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

I believe there's not a harder job in the world than being a teacher, and there isn't a job with a more direct impact on the performance of our students.

We can teach a lot of things, but if the teacher can't relate by talking to a group of friendly students, he'll never be a competent teacher.

Education is a shared commitment between dedicated teachers, motivated students and enthusiastic parents with high expectations.

The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: 'Does your teacher use class time well?' and, 'When you're confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?'

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

People think of teachers who are born to teach, and you think of all these charismatic folks. Some of the most successful teachers are some of the least charismatic, interestingly. But they have a gift of figuring out what motivates people.

More often than not, the most effective leaders have been shaped by teaching successfully in high needs classrooms. Because of their experience, they know that it is possible for low-income children to achieve on an absolute scale and understand what we need to do to allow them to fulfill their potential.

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.

Professors gravitate to the bright, well-prepared students. They are easier to teach, and they appear to profit most from instruction, which may simply mean they are most like the professors. But in the increasing pluralism and decreasing professionalism of colleges and universities in the next decades, the master teacher is likely to be the one who can provide context for many kinds of students.

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.

You have to have teachers who are empowered to facilitate great teaching.