Contest Winner Tips: The Why and How of Good Teachers

Editor's note: EWA will post tips and advice over the next two weeks from first-prize winners of EWA's National Awards for Education Reporting. Emily Hanford, Catherine Winter, Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks won first prize for broadcast feature, news feature, or issue package. Hanford describes how she pulled the project together.

Testing Teachers

I am a producer for American RadioWorks. We are the national documentary unit of APM, American Public Media. We produce radio programs, websites and podcasts. I joined the staff in January of 2008 as part of an effort to expand ARW’s coverage of education. I recently looked back at some story idea notes I wrote up during my first few weeks on the job and idea number one at the top of the page was “What makes a good teacher?” Here are some of the thoughts and questions I wrote down:

Include research on good teaching, provoke questions, why don’t we have better answers to this question? Talk about why this is important and all that is going on at the policy level to try to draw up guidelines for good teachers, then try to define what a good teacher is…. Profile or profiles of good teachers and why they are effective? Students on teachers? People’s memories of good teachers? Why low-income kids don’t get good teachers, what impact that is having on our society…longer term project?”

The topic seemed gigantic and overwhelming and I wasn’t sure where to begin. I put the idea aside for a while and completed documentaries on other topics. But even in those programs – one was about community college students, the other about preschool - I found myself thinking a lot about the importance of good teaching and what a critical difference teachers make when it comes to the success of students, and the success of education reform efforts.

By the fall of 2009, when I was again looking for new topics, “teacher quality” was becoming a big buzz phrase in education policy debates. I live just outside of Washington, D.C. where the story of schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and her efforts to overhaul the teacher evaluation system was unfolding in dramatic fashion. I had read, like so many others, Malcolm Gladwell’s provocative 2008 New Yorker article about teachers, “Most Likely to Succeed.” That piece put together the research on teaching in a way that was very helpful for me. I began to see the outlines of a project that felt concrete and current, and that’s how I got started making the documentary that became “Testing Teachers.”

The two questions I was most interested in trying to answer were: why was “teacher quality” emerging as a top education issue, and if teacher quality is so important, how can teachers already in the classroom learn to become better?

With every project I work on, I always seem to be interested in some version of the first question – why does a particular policy debate or controversy arise at a particular time? I’m not sure my piece provides a full answer to the question, but it’s why I begin the program by going back to the 1960s to explore the origins of the teacher effectiveness research that is driving so much of the debate today.

I was interested in the second question about how teachers learn to get better because I felt that question was getting short shrift in all the talk about teachers. It seemed to me that many of the people with a dog in the fight believed teachers are born and not made; they were pushing for policies to sort good teachers from bad ones, not necessarily to help struggling teachers get better. I wanted to find out if teachers could get better – and how.

I won’t say much more about the final program except that the first part focuses on the history of teacher research and what was happening in Washington, D.C. under Michelle Rhee, and the second part is about a school system effort in Tennessee where struggling teachers did learn to get better. You can listen to it here.


I was asked in this piece to offer tips and advice for fellow education reporters. I’ll begin by saying that I didn’t think of myself as an education reporter until a few years ago, and now that I do, I’m convinced I will always want to be one. I find covering education to be consistently interesting, challenging and moving. I think this work matters a lot, and I am both grateful for the opportunity to do it and thankful for all of the superb education writers out there that I learn from everyday.

My advice has to do with the notes I made reference to at the beginning of this piece. As I am sure you all do, I take lots and lots of notes as I am working my way through a project, filling up steno books with my horrible handwriting as I read, make phone calls, and go out into the field to do interviews and observe. I think of those as my first draft notes. I also make a second draft set of notes as I go. I type these up and save them on my computer.

There are two types of these second draft notes. The first type I call, simply, “ideas notes.” Every few days or weeks I write down what I am thinking about, the information that seems most important, the questions that are most compelling or confusing, the details and references I want to be sure to remember. The early ideas about a teacher documentary that I made reference to at the beginning of this article came from these kinds of notes.

I also make a set of notes I call “log notes.” The name is a radio-centric term; at the end of each day of field reporting I have a set of recordings that will eventually get loosely transcribed, or “logged.” For each of those logs, I create a companion set of notes. I write these notes at the end of every reporting day. They include everything I can remember that might be important – memories of the best things people said, new ideas, physical descriptions, details about what was on people’s walls, in their bookshelves, the expressions on their faces when they said certain things.

Often I am flipping through my steno books as I do this, copying notes I took while in the field. But the log notes are a much more complete version of the day – the phrases and lists in my notebooks turned into narrative. I use almost none of these details in my final programs; radio is an especially efficient medium, and there’s room for only so much. But I find these notes to be invaluable as I try to sort out what’s most important in a story. I typically don’t read my log notes until I am getting ready to write and produce the story – which for me is many weeks, or months, after the initial reporting. When I read my log notes, I sometimes think someone else wrote them because I can’t remember having that thought or seeing that expression and I am so grateful I took the time to write everything down.

When I went back to read the notes I wrote about story ideas after my first few weeks as an education reporter, I was surprised to find that the top topic was teachers and that the ideas and questions I had back then, when the topic seemed so huge and hard to get a handle on, were the ideas and questions I ended up trying to tackle in the documentary.

To me it’s a lesson about the value and clarity first impressions can provide. By the time I am writing and producing a documentary, I am so far away from first impressions. I am considering and reconsidering every idea, every phrase, every piece of tape. It’s painstaking, and it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Going back to my ideas notes and my log notes helps me recover first impressions, and those often offer very good guidance as I labor to put the final story together.