What Makes a Great Teacher Great?
Beth Alexander with students in her lab at Linden. Photo: Markian Lozowchuk
What should parents be looking for in educators? We asked one of the best.
By Glen Herbert (excerpt from article published on OurKids.Net)
Beth Alexander, a primary and elementary instructor at The Linden School, is a teacher that a lot of people think is great, including the prime minister. In 2017, she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence, and this year she was the first Canadian educator to earn a Lowell Milken Centre Fellowship. Beth is a STEM teacher extraordinaire, which is likely why she came to the attention of the Lowell Milken Centre. She built the school’s makerspace herself out of salvaged materials; she constructed a life-size model that allows students to climb inside a computer; she created a lab to explore the chemistry of candy; there wasn’t a K-8 computer studies curriculum, so she wrote one. But all of it, she feels, is in service to a set of relationships: those between her and her students, and those they share each other. For her, learning begins with those relationships. And when it comes to great teaching, she knows what she's talking about. We asked her about what she likes to see in educators, and what she hopes her students will see in her.