Future teachers face a challenge that they can meet, a retired teacher and administrator told some of them Oct. 7 at Bluffton University.

‘Andrea King, now assistant to the director of teacher education at Bluffton, asked “Is Having a Heart for Teaching Enough?” in the title of her presentation in a campus forum. The answer is yes, she said, “with a few more ingredients added to it.”

Among those ingredients is efficacy—for teachers, belief in one’s ability to teach effectively. Those who have it say “I can make a difference in a child’s life,” she said. “I can teach no matter what.”

King was a longtime teacher and administrator in Lima City Schools before serving six years as principal of Findlay’s Washington Intermediate School, which houses grades 3-5. The Washington staff believed they could make a difference for their 200-plus students, most of whom received free or reduced-price lunches, she noted. And that’s how, by 2011-12, the school came to be designated as “Excellent with Distinction” and as a “School of Promise” by the Ohio Department of Education, she continued.

King listed a number of current issues in education, including school report cards, funding, teacher evaluation, charter schools and the “gender gap.” On the latter issue, she cited several statistics indicating that boys are more at risk for academic failure, and asked the teacher education students in her audience what they will do about it.

“It’s going to change your teaching; it’s going to make you think, ‘How can I help my boys?’” she predicted, pointing out that most boys are visual learners and urging the future teachers to consider how to address their needs.

“I want you to know your students,” including how they learn and what their interests are, she added, calling that task “the first thing you need to do” as teachers.

King, a Martha Holden Jennings Scholar, grew up in Chicago and started her teaching career there, in the same elementary school she had attended. She discussed diversity—a concept that encompasses acceptance and respect, she noted—and multicultural education, saying that many new teachers will find themselves in inner-city schools because that’s where teachers are most needed. She suggested that her education-bound listeners set aside any possible biases that inner-city students can’t succeed because, she asserted, “yes, they can.”

“A caring teacher who accepts no excuses and who refuses to let them fail is what all students want,” she maintained. And while mandated testing has become a fact of life in education, teachers can’t test what students don’t know, “so you have to teach before you can assess,” she pointed out in response to a question.

Teachers are in the classroom foremost “to teach students and meet their needs,” King said. Meeting those needs is the “huge challenge before you,” she told the members of the next generation in the audience, “and you have what it takes to meet that challenge.”
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