My quality teacher

Students and parents often refer fondly to a specific teacher who influenced their lives in a transformative manner. However, it is not clear what makes these teachers great. Is it their attention to the needs of individual students or their effective teaching of the curriculum? Is it the way they instill their students with knowledge and skills, or how they educate them according to a set of values and beliefs?

When the Trump Foundation set out to advance high quality teaching of Mathematics and the Sciences, we asked ourselves an important preliminary question:  What do we mean by high quality teaching?  We have started to delve into this issue by translating and uploading a series of teaching standards from around the world to the foundation website.  The Trump Master Teacher Award, in its inaugural year, will hopefully provide another opportunity to tackle this important question.

In order to generate a wider discussion on the criteria for high-quality teaching, Hinuch Israeli are proposing to ask members of the Israeli public about their own experiences with a great teacher, and what made this teacher so great. Two hundred successful professionals including scientists, doctors, engineers, and high-tech executives will be interviewed on film about their Mathematics and Science teachers. The footage will be edited into short video clips which will be virally disseminated via You-Tube and social networks.

Hinuch Israeli is a small nonprofit organization, which employs young enthusiastic teachers on a voluntary basis to collect data about education in Israel and distribute it via the internet and social networks. The organization promises to try and track the teachers mentioned in the interviews, to interview them as well if they are willing, and to honor them by thanking them and mentioning them in the films.

* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 43