Teachers as Preachers

For my group reading "Other People's Children" by Lisa Delpit, I was wondering your feelings on her comparison of teachers to preachers. In the chapter "Cross Cultural Confusions" she talks a little bit about how reformers of educational policy have looked towards law, business, and medicine to develop models for improving the training and assessing of teachers, but Delpit argues that teachers resemble preachers more. Like a preacher, each teacher must relate to different cultural constituencies. Preachers must modify the language they use to their audience. For example, a Baptist preacher might use "rhythm, intonation, gesture, emotion, humor use of metaphor, indirect personal messages to individuals, and audience participation." (Delpit, p. 137). On the other hand a Episcopalian minister uses logical structure, little humor and almost all of the meaning is found solely in the words.

Each of these preachers has a different audience, and they express their messages in very different ways. I believe that this is the same for teacher because every teacher has a different cultural group that we need to get a message across to. I think the while the MTELS and teaching assessments are a good way to assess a teachers content knowledge, there is little assessment on how a teacher is presenting the lesson through language. This is important because even if you a a math genius, you still need to find a way for students to become interested and involved in your lesson through the way you deliver it. Jaime Escalante said it the best, "My skills are really to motivate these kids to make them learn, to give them ganas -- the desire to learn." (Delpit, p. 139).

So my question is how should we assess teachers on their ability to linguistically connect with students and motivate them to learn and not just the teachers knowledge of subject matter?