Wendy Kopp Quotes

The quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers.

If you improve a teacher's self-esteem, confidence, communication skills or stress levels, you improve that teacher's overall effectiveness across the curriculum.

You wouldn't tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or a underperforming midwife at your child's birth. Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?

Most teachers in America could dramatically improve their teaching if they just made every second count.

Teachers must learn how to teach ... they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.

The best method for a given teacher is the one which is most familiar to the teacher.

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.

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

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.

We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods.

The simple facts are these: We need higher standards in our schools, and we need to hold teachers accountable for the outcomes in their classrooms.

Teachers know how to improve education.

I think a lot of teachers want to talk about how to continually improve performance.

You don't become a good teacher by applying techniques; you don't become a good teacher by using the latest hot methodologies that are being promoted in this or that handbook.

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.

Instructors should not only be skilful in those sciences which they teach, but have skill in the method of teaching, and patience in the practice.

We need to do everything we can to ensure every single child has an effective teacher every day, which means we need to identify who are the most highly effective teachers, and we should recognize and reward them for the incredible professionals that they are.

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals', the ones who somehow know how to teach.

There is no recipe to be a great teacher, that's what is unique about them.

To this end the greatest asset of a school is the personality of the teacher.

I wasn't a very good teacher.

I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.

You have to give kids things they're interested in reading. That's what teachers do who are engaged in what their students want.

There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.

Teacher compensation isn't the only factor in cultivating great teaching. Other important priorities include changing how we measure student performance, providing more flexibility to teacher-preparation programs, and improving how we train and support principals.