Like mining for precious stones: The wisdom and work of exemplary teachers

What qualities in certain teachers compel others to turn to them for example and mentoring? What enables these exemplary teachers to sustain what they do over time? These questions translated into an ethnographic research project with seven exemplary public high school teachers from the same school. All of the teachers were identified by colleagues and administrators as having exemplary qualities and had been teaching for at least five years at the time of the study.; This inquiry, grounded in an epistemology informed by liberative education theories (Freire and Greene) and feminist and Latin American theologies of liberation (Gutierrez, Johnson, Russell), assumes that all knowing is subjective and situated. It also presumes that all education is “religious,” invoking a response of “duty and reverence” in its participants (A. N. Whitehead) and contributing to their capacities to make meaning out of experience (Dewey). Given these foundations, the study engaged qualitative research and analysis methods combining the inductive approaches of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot) and narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly). Data was collected through a series of semistructured interviews and classroom observations with each teacher over the course of an academic year. Following Parker Palmer's suspicion that good teaching emerges from the “inner landscape” of the teacher, observations and interviews focused on teachers' sense of identity (voice), sense of purpose (vision), and sense of work (vocation).; The research elicited two primary insights—first, what marks these teachers as exemplary is a quality of integrity. Despite their significant differences in practices, personality, and motivation, they shared an integration of voice, vision, and vocation. Second, their persistence rests in what Maxine Greene calls the capacity of the “reshaping imagination,” or that which opens one up to the new and the “other” and makes empathy, transcendence, and democratic community possible. The “reshaping imagination” enables them to engage both change and diversity as well as the vision of the common good towards which Greene says all teachers strive. These insights point to the shortcomings of deductively-driven, mainstream attempts to investigate and evaluate teachers, missing as they do the particularity and interiority that mark the exemplary teacher's work and character.