Teaching is the process of attending to student's needs, experiences and feelings, and making specific interventions to help them learn things. They are grouping together teaching, learning and assessment – and adding in some other things around the sort of outcomes they want to see.

A teacher's role is to make informed and intelligent decisions about practice to achieve various outcomes with and for students in their classes. A teacher's role is to make judgments about how best to help their students learn in the environments in which they teach.

Great teachers form strong relationships with their students and show that they care about them as people. Great teachers are warm, accessible, enthusiastic and caring. Teachers with these qualities are known to stay after school and make themselves available to students and parents who need them.

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "apparently ordinary" people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.

Teachers who inspire know that teaching is like cultivating a garden, and those who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.