“Great teachers are born, not made” is one of the great myths of teacher training. Unfortunately, it is also a myth which makes its way into the subconscious of prospective teachers. As we prepare to begin a new academic year in initial teacher education, I know there are soon-to-be beginning teachers allowing that concern to take hold, causing them to doubt if they should be entering teacher training at all. So let me be clear from the off: it is rubbish.
Darling-Hammond has refuted this notion frequently in her work, regularly asserting that teachers are made rather than born:
‘Even very intelligent people who are enthusiastic about teaching find that they cannot easily succeed without preparation, especially if they are assigned to work with children who most need skillful teaching’ (Darling-Hammond, 2023).
Indeed, my own experience would bear this out. For example, Edward was far from a ‘natural’ in the classroom. Indeed, for the entirety of the first teaching practice placement, you would have assumed he would not make the course. Yet, over a decade later, Edward is now a member of SLT who was recently nominated by his students for a national teaching award. Meanwhile Beryl, who found the whole experience of learning to teach pretty bewildering initially, found her feet and is now a successful Head of Department. And I also often meet mentors, who I once supported as beginning teachers, whose professional growth has (brilliantly) far exceeded the trajectory you may have predicted at the end of their training year.
There is no doubt that pre-existing skills and dispositions can support the initial process of becoming a teacher – for example possessing strong subject knowledge and displaying personality traits such as empathy, patience, enthusiasm. However, as Darling-Hammond asserted, these are not enough on their own. Beginning teachers who achieved the highest outcomes in their own subject-studies, still need support to break down concepts and effectively communicate this knowledge to novices. Similarly, dispositions can also be learnt and enhanced through informed and supported experiences in practice; beginning teachers with ‘natural’ presence still benefit from learning to implement behavioural routines in the classroom.
Effective teacher education programmes understand the complexity inherent in this process of professional growth (see Clarke and Hollingsworth’s Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (2002, p. 951)). They design their curriculum and practice-based experiences accordingly, to ensure beginning teachers have opportunities to develop the associated core-practices necessary for effective teaching and learning and their teacher identity. They recognise beginning teachers need to grasp that getting better at teaching requires a willingness to challenge preconceptions, humbly self-reflect, accept support, and keep on learning and improving incrementally, one step at a time. And they support them to do this.
So, if you are awaiting the start of your teacher training year, feeling like an imposter and wondering if you have enough of the ‘natural traits’ necessary to be a good teacher, please be assured that the only pre-requisite you really need is a willingness to learn and work at it during a career which will embody continuous professional development.
Teachers are made, not born.
To that end, I will finish this blog with the words of Scott and Dinham (2008): ‘good teaching is the product of situational factors, and ‘unstable’ person factors, including experience, hard work, mentoring by others and willingness to reflect, grow and learn.’ (It is a great paper for killing this myth, and I recommend you read it!)
References
Clarke, D. & Hollingsworth, H. (2002) Elaborating a model of teacher professional growth, Teaching and Teacher Education, 18 (2002), pp. 947-967. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0742-051X(02)00053-7
Darling-Hammond, L. (2023). Reprint: How Teacher Education Matters*. Journal of Teacher Education, 74(2), 151-156. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224871231161863
Scott, C. & Dinham, S. (2008). Born not made: the nativist myth and teachers’ thinking, Teacher Development, 12:2, 115-124, https://doi.org/10.1080/13664530802038105
Becoming a History Teacher 
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