What makes a good teacher

A lot of discussion has been directed to how to maximize your teaching effort. An article in the New York Times, which can be found here, talks of an interesting solutions to increasing the effectiveness of teachers. While the main focus of the article is not about the collegiate level, a couple of general points can be made pertaining to collegiate education.

Just as recently hired college faculty are paired up with more tenured colleague to get their research started, a similar technique can be made with regards to teaching. Since most incoming faculty members have little or no teaching experience, I think having a more experienced lecturer to bounce ideas off and ask for advice would be an extremely beneficial system for maximizing the efficiency of the lectures.

This mentor figure would be most valuable in classroom management, which the article describes as incredibly important to the learning process. Since most incoming faculty do not have the teaching experience to manage a classroom efficiently, advice from the senior faculty member would be invaluable in the classroom.

So why isn't this mentor relationship done more with an eye on teaching? In my view, teaching is viewed as a birthday cake at a party. It needs to be there, but the lack of a great cake isn't going to make or break the party. Considering faculty members need to bring in 85% of their effort in non-teaching related duties, spending the extra effort on teaching is often viewed as unnecessary.