Book Review: “The Good Teacher”

The Teacher as Student

What makes a good teacher?

It sounds like a simple question until you try to answer it.

Is it someone who knows her subject extraordinarily well? Someone who can hold the attention of a room? Someone whose students earn impressive scores? Someone who writes meticulous lesson plans, asks brilliant questions, or somehow convinces a reluctant 10-year-old that fractions really do matter?

In The Good Teacher: Ten Key Pedagogical Principles That Will Transform Your Teaching, authors Carrie Eben and Christopher Perrin argue that we may be starting in the wrong place.

Before asking what a good teacher does, they ask us to consider who a good teacher is.

That distinction is one reason Innovate Academy's Mentors are reading The Good Teacher together this year. Published by Classical Academic Press in 2025, the book deliberately avoids becoming another collection of classroom hacks. Eben and Perrin instead return to ten principles drawn from the classical tradition—ideas about how human beings actually learn, remember, wonder, converse, and grow.

Some sound almost rebellious in a culture obsessed with speed and productivity.

Festina lente: Make haste slowly.

Multum non multa: Much, not many.

Repetitio mater memoriae: Repetition is the mother of memory.

Then come principles that feel immediately recognizable in a joyful classroom: songs, chants and jingles; wonder and curiosity; contemplation; embodied learning; learning by teaching; good books; conversation and friendship.

Taken together, they offer a rather different picture of education.

A good classroom does not have to race.

A good teacher does not have to cram every available fact into a child's head.

Sometimes learning looks like repeating something until it becomes part of us. Sometimes it means lingering over one excellent book instead of racing through five. Sometimes it means singing something ridiculous enough that no one forgets it. Sometimes it means putting down the worksheet and having a conversation.

And sometimes it means allowing a child enough time to wonder.

Good Teachers Are Still Becoming

Perhaps the most compelling idea in the book is also its most demanding: the character of the teacher matters.

Eben and Perrin distinguish between being good at teaching and being a good teacher. The latter involves more than professional competence. The teacher is herself meant to be a person pursuing wisdom and virtue—a lifelong learner whose students encounter not merely what she knows, but the kind of person she is becoming.

That idea feels particularly important now.

As we explore elsewhere in this issue, artificial intelligence can increasingly explain information, generate exercises, offer feedback, and personalize practice. Those capabilities will continue to improve.

But education has never been only the transfer of information from the person who knows to the person who doesn't.

Children imitate.

They notice what adults delight in. They recognize genuine curiosity. They know when someone loves a story rather than merely assigning it. They learn something about perseverance by watching an adult wrestle with a difficult question. They learn how to disagree by listening to adults disagree well.

In that sense, the teacher is always teaching—even when she isn't delivering a lesson.

And perhaps one of the best things a teacher can model for a child is this:

I am still learning, too.

What We're Reading at Innovate

That makes our faculty's reading of The Good Teacher especially fitting because the books aren't stopping with the adults.

This year, Innovate is journeying through the Ancient World, and our scholars are reading their way into the civilizations, stories, conflicts, and questions that shaped it.

Our Grade 5 scholars are beginning Black Ships Before Troy, Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling of the Iliad, entering the world of Achilles, Hector, Helen, and the legendary war between the Greeks and Trojans.

Our Grade 6 scholars are finishing Tirzah, Lucille Travis's historical novel set during the Exodus, which invites readers to imagine the biblical story through the eyes of a young Hebrew girl leaving slavery in Egypt for an unknown future.

And our Upper School scholars are reading Omnibus I and The Children's Homer, moving more deeply into the great texts and ideas of the ancient world and encountering the heroes, civilizations, beliefs, virtues, and failures that continue to echo through Western culture.

Different books. Different ages. One long conversation.

Across them, scholars encounter questions that haven't become obsolete simply because the stories are old:

What makes someone heroic?

What does a civilization worship?

What do people owe their families, their communities, their enemies, and their God?

What makes a story worth passing from one generation to another?

Perhaps that's what a culture of learning should look like: Mentors studying the art of teaching while the scholars entrusted to them are reading the stories that have taught generations before them.

Adults and children alike remain students.

The books change as we grow. The invitation to remain a student never does.