Book Review: "The Practically Perfect Teacher" by Jackie Beere

Every first-year teacher I’ve ever met starts off with a hearty dose of idealism. No one goes into teaching thinking they can’t make a difference. But now, after a decade of teaching, I have watched my idealistic colleagues shrivel under the realities of a career in education, realities that aren’t always set in the teacher’s classroom or in circumstances that a teacher can control. I have noticed that the most negative teachers I know are the ones that started off the most principled and, seemingly, the most committed—I suppose they are most disappointed.

English author, Jackie Beere, in her book, The Practically Perfect Teacher does an effective job bridging the gap between principles and practice. She starts off providing hope. Ms. Beere cites the conclusions of Mark Hattie and the research of an 800 meta-analyses study that looked at 15,000 articles and 240 million students. The hope found in the research is that thinking matters. Hattie believes that how we think in schools constitutes “a set of principles that create mindframes to underpin our every action and decision.” How we think about the job matters. It matters that we believe in education, learning, schools and our students. The idealism that all new teachers have is important—it’s just that teachers need good tools and training and leadership to be effective.

In general, thinking, meta-cognition, reflection—whatever you want to call it—is the real theme of Ms. Beere’s book. That is the individual teacher’s bridge between principle and practice. She writes about habits and mindsets and beliefs in an attempt to get the teacher to see how to make progress in the classroom, and then to take those same skills and to let the students to have ownership over their learning.

There’s not a lot in Ms. Beere’s book that I haven’t seen before. But that’s okay, the good ideas are already out there. They don’t need be reinvented. They just need to be implemented effectively, improved on, and combined with other ideas to meet the needs of students. The strength of Ms. Beere’s book is the consistently demonstrated idea that a teacher’s beliefs can, with good habits, produce actions that make one a better teacher, and, I would add, that this is something worth modeling to students so that they can imitate the process to become better learners themselves.

For me the most beneficial chapter was number three: Lessons Are for Learning: What Makes the Perfect Lesson. There is a nice set of lists to help teachers remember what’s important: literacy, engagement, challenge, differentiation, question(-ing), independent and collaborative learning, and leadership. It’s a lot to keep track of, but Ms. Beere’s book makes it seem a little less impossible.