How to Become a Better Teacher: From Visible Excellence to Lasting Impact

Ask a principal who the best teacher in the school is, and you will probably hear about the person whose lesson plans arrive on time, whose registers are never late, and whose syllabus finishes a week early. Ask a former student the same question twenty years later, and you will often hear a different name.

That gap is the subject of this article. If you want to become a better teacher, the appraisal form is a poor map. It measures what is easy to see. The things that change a student's life sit lower down, in places most schools never look.

Manish Pandey, Teacher Career Mentor and Associate Director at Suraasa, built a full session around this question. His argument is simple and demanding at once. Excellence in teaching is not about compliance or years served. It is about emotional safety, student self-efficacy, and mindset shifts that cannot be undone. Below, we work through his framework, the research behind it, and three strategies you can use in your next lesson.

Watch Manish Pandey's full session to see how he builds the three layers of teaching excellence and models each classroom strategy in action.

The Appraisals Dilemma: What Principals Score vs. What Students Remember

Most teacher appraisals follow a familiar pattern. Did you submit your lesson plans? Were you punctual? Did you complete the syllabus? Did you return marked papers on time? Did you attend the staff meetings?

None of these are bad questions. A school cannot run without them. But Pandey points out that they all measure the same thing: compliance. They tell a principal whether a teacher is reliable. They say very little about whether that teacher changed anyone.

Now think about the teachers you remember from your own school years. It is unlikely you remember them for their punctuality. Pandey's observation is that students remember the teacher who noticed they were struggling. The one who explained a concept a third time without sighing. The one who said something that made them believe they could do it.

This creates a real dilemma for you as a teacher. You can be rated outstanding on paper and leave no trace on your students. You can also be quietly changing lives while your appraisal reads "meets expectations".

The answer is not to ignore appraisals. Meet them. They are the baseline. But if you measure your own growth only by that form, you will optimise for the wrong things. The rest of Pandey's argument explains why the things students remember are not soft extras. They are how learning works.

The Cognitive Science of Memory: Why Facts Fade and Feelings Stick

Pandey grounds his argument in cognitive research, drawing on the work of psychologist Endel Tulving, who distinguished between different memory systems in the brain. The practical version for a classroom teacher is this: there is memory for facts, and there is memory for experiences.

Factual memory, Pandey explains, leaks. A formula memorised for a test can be gone within weeks. Most adults cannot recall the quadratic formula or the dates of a battle they once wrote an exam on. That knowledge was stored, used once, and quietly lost.

Experiential and emotional memory behaves differently. It endures. You may not remember what your Class 8 science teacher taught in October, but you remember how you felt in that room. Whether you were afraid to ask a question. Whether you felt clever or slow. Whether someone believed in you.

This does not mean facts are unimportant. It means facts survive better when they are attached to an experience. A student who discovered why ice floats through a puzzling demonstration, felt confused, argued with a classmate and then saw it click, holds that concept differently from a student who copied a definition from the board.

For your practice, the implication is direct. The emotional climate of your classroom is not separate from content delivery. It is the medium through which content is stored. A classroom where students feel anxious stores fear alongside the lesson. A classroom where students feel safe to be wrong stores curiosity.

Ask yourself one question after your next lesson: what did my students feel during those 40 minutes? That answer will predict what they keep far better than the slide count.

Building Self-Efficacy: The Difference Between Temporary Grades and Permanent Change

If emotional memory is the storage system, self-efficacy is what gets written into it. Pandey draws on two well-known bodies of research here: Carol Dweck's work on mindset and Albert Bandura's concept of self-efficacy, a person's belief in their own ability to succeed at a task.

His central point is that a teacher's specific praise of effort builds self-efficacy. And, as Pandey notes, self-efficacy is a stronger predictor of future achievement than IQ or family income. That is a striking claim, and it changes how you think about your role.

A grade is temporary. A student scores 62 in a unit test, then 78 in the next. The number moves up and down with every assessment. But a belief such as "I am someone who can figure out hard problems" travels with the student into every future classroom, job and challenge.

This is what Pandey means when he defines the goal of teaching:

"The best teacher creates the most irreversible positive change in students" (Manish Pandey)

Irreversible is the key word. Marks can be lost. Knowledge can fade. A genuine shift in how a student sees themselves tends to stay.

What does effort-specific praise look like in practice? Compare these two responses to a student who finally solves a difficult geometry problem:

• Generic: "Well done, you're so smart."
• Specific: "You tried three different approaches before this one worked. That persistence is exactly what solved it."

The first praises a fixed trait the student cannot control. The second names a behaviour the student can repeat. Over a year, the second kind of feedback teaches a student that success is something they build. That lesson outlasts any syllabus.

The Teaching Iceberg: What Really Drives Educational Impact

Picture your teaching as an iceberg. Above the waterline sit the things everyone can see: your lesson plan, your board work, your marking, your classroom routines. Below the waterline sits the larger mass: the relationships, the trust, the sense of safety, the beliefs students form about themselves.

Pandey argues that most of the impact comes from below the waterline. To support this, he refers to John Hattie's synthesis of over 1,500 studies on what influences student learning. The relational quality between teacher and student, Pandey highlights, drives learning outcomes more effectively than school budgets, elaborate curricula or class size.

"The quality of the bond between a teacher and a student does more to student learning than 80% of the things the school spends the entire budget upon." (Manish Pandey)

Sit with that for a moment. Schools invest heavily in smart boards, new textbooks, renovated labs and branded curricula. Those things have value. But the connection you build with a 14-year-old who has stopped raising their hand may matter more than all of them.

This is good news for teachers. It means the most powerful lever in education is one you already hold. You do not need a budget approval to greet a disengaged student by name, to notice that someone's work has dropped off, or to ask a quiet student what they think.

Pandey offers a concrete habit: spend the first 90 seconds of class connecting with disengaged or quiet students before you open a textbook or introduce the topic. A short check-in at the door. A comment about something they mentioned last week. Ninety seconds is less than one percent of a school day. Repeated across a term, it reshapes what sits below the waterline.

If you are already working on routines and behaviour, our guide to classroom management strategies that actually work pairs well with this relational approach. Management keeps the room running. Relationships make the room worth being in.

The Three Layers of Excellence: Visible, Emotional, and Transformational

Pandey organises teaching excellence into three progressive layers. Each one builds on the one before. You cannot skip to the top.

Layer 1: Visible Excellence

This is the pedagogical baseline. You know your subject. You plan well. Your explanations are clear and your activities serve a purpose. Frameworks such as the 5E lesson plan model and backward design live here. This layer is necessary. It is not sufficient.

Layer 2: Emotional Excellence

Here, students feel safe enough to take intellectual risks. They will say "I don't understand" out loud. They will offer a half-formed idea. Feedback becomes a conversation rather than a verdict. Without this layer, even brilliant Layer 1 teaching bounces off students who are too anxious to engage.

Layer 3: Transformational Excellence

This is where the irreversible change happens. A student does not just learn chemistry. They start to see themselves as someone who asks questions about the world. A student who was told they were "not a language person" writes something they are proud of and quietly revises their identity.

Most appraisal systems stop at Layer 1. Most memorable teachers operate at Layers 2 and 3. Becoming a better teacher means deliberately building upward.

Are You a Radio or Spotify? Rethinking Differentiated Instruction

Pandey uses a memorable metaphor to describe two kinds of teaching.

A radio station broadcasts the same content at a single frequency to everyone. It does not know who is listening. It does not know whether the signal is clear or full of static. It plays the next track whether you liked the last one or switched off.

Spotify works differently. It notices what you listen to, what you skip, what you replay. It adapts in real time to your patterns.

A radio teacher delivers the planned lesson regardless of reception. The slides go up in order. The explanation is the same for the student who got it in two minutes and the student who is lost. The bell rings, the lesson ends, and the teacher discovers in the unit test, weeks later, that half the class never understood.

A Spotify teacher tunes in. They watch faces, listen to answers, and notice patterns. When three students make the same error, they pause and address it. When the class is ahead, they push deeper. The plan is a starting point, not a script.

Here is what the shift looks like in a single lesson on fractions:

• Radio: Explain adding fractions with unlike denominators. Do two examples. Assign 15 practice questions. Collect at the end.
• Spotify: Pose one problem. Ask students to try it on mini whiteboards. Scan responses in 30 seconds. Notice that six students added the denominators. Address that misconception directly. Split the room: those who are secure move to word problems, those who are not work through a visual model with you.

The Spotify approach depends on frequent, low-stakes checks for understanding. Our guide to 25 quick classroom assessment techniques gives you a toolkit for exactly this, and the distinction between assessment for learning and assessment of learning explains why these checks matter more than end-of-unit tests for daily teaching.

Experience vs. Mastery: Why 20 Years in the Classroom May Not Equal Growth

This is perhaps the most uncomfortable part of Pandey's argument, and the most important.

"20 years of teaching is not the same as 20 years of teaching better. One is experience, the other one is mastery." (Manish Pandey)

Pandey draws on Anders Ericsson's research on expertise, which shows that mastery comes not from time spent but from deliberate practice: focused effort to improve specific weaknesses, with feedback. Without that deliberate examination, he argues, twenty years of teaching can simply be one year of habit repeated twenty times.

This is not a criticism of experienced teachers. Experience is valuable. It gives you pattern recognition, calm under pressure and a deep store of examples. But experience alone does not guarantee growth. A routine that worked in 2010 may be quietly failing students today, and without examination you would never know.

The research community has been making a similar case. The OECD's work on developing teacher expertise examines how teachers build and refine expertise over a career rather than assuming it accumulates automatically. In the United States, the Brookings Institution has argued that state legislation should expand the mandate of certification bodies, or create new ones, to support professional learning across the entire career continuum. The shared idea: growth must be structured, not assumed. The U.S. Department of Education similarly publishes guidance on supporting teacher development well beyond initial certification.

Pandey's practical recommendation is a termly audit of your own instructional habits. At the end of each term, ask:

1. Which routine do I use every lesson without thinking about it?
2. What evidence do I have that it helps students learn?
3. What would happen if I changed or removed it for two weeks?

You might discover that your standard lesson opener, five minutes of copying notes from the board, adds nothing. Or that your homework review routine helps the strongest students and loses everyone else. Small audits, done honestly, convert experience into mastery.

Peer observation makes this far easier. Our article on classroom observation, feedback and reflective practice explains how to set this up so it feels supportive rather than evaluative. And if you want to plan your growth across a full year, see our guide to building an annual CPD plan.

The Socratic Model: How Pure Questioning Shapes Generations

To show how far the transformational layer can reach, Pandey turns to Socrates.

Socrates had no classroom. No textbooks. No curriculum. No lesson plans, no appraisal, no smart board. What he had was questioning. By asking targeted questions, he guided students like Plato to conclusions they had never considered before. Plato went on to teach Aristotle. The line of influence runs through much of Western thought.

Pandey's point is not that you should abandon your syllabus and wander the corridors asking about virtue. It is that questioning, done well, is among the most powerful teaching tools that exists. It is free. It requires no technology. And it builds exactly the kind of thinking that survives long after factual memory has faded.

Notice what Socratic questioning does to a student. It does not hand over an answer. It makes the student build one. That act of construction is effortful, sometimes uncomfortable, and deeply memorable. The student owns the conclusion because they reached it.

This connects back to everything earlier in Pandey's argument. Questioning creates experience, which sticks in memory. Reaching a conclusion yourself builds self-efficacy. And a teacher who asks rather than tells is, by definition, tuning in like Spotify rather than broadcasting like radio.

The three strategies that follow are practical, classroom-sized versions of the Socratic approach. You can use any of them tomorrow.

Strategy 1: Misconception-Led Instruction to Spark Real Thinking

Most lessons begin with a definition or explanation. Pandey suggests starting somewhere else: with a deliberate misconception or incorrect statement.

Why? Because a correct statement invites passive acceptance. Students nod, copy it down and move on. An incorrect statement creates tension. Something feels off. Students have to reason their way to why it is wrong, and in doing so they build the correct understanding themselves.

Here is how it might look across subjects:

• Science: Write on the board, "Heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones." Ask: "Who agrees? Why?" Let students argue before you introduce any evidence.
• Mathematics: Present a worked solution: "0.5 is smaller than 0.25 because 5 is smaller than 25." Ask students to find the flaw and explain it to a partner.
• History: Claim, "The war started because of a single assassination." Ask students to defend or challenge it using what they already know.
• English: Offer a sample paragraph with a confident but poorly supported argument. Ask, "Would this convince you? What is missing?"

A few principles make this work well. Choose misconceptions that students genuinely hold, not obvious absurdities. Give thinking time before discussion. And make it safe to agree with the wrong claim. If students who initially agree are mocked, you destroy the emotional safety that Layer 2 depends on.

Misconception-led instruction also gives you diagnostic information. When students reveal what they believe, you learn exactly where to aim the rest of the lesson. That is Spotify teaching in action.

Strategy 2: Depth-Oriented Questioning Beyond the Right Answer

In most classrooms, a correct answer ends the conversation. The teacher says "Good" and moves to the next question. Pandey argues this wastes the most valuable moment in the exchange.

Depth-oriented questioning treats every correct answer as a launchpad. Once a student is right, you push further. Can they give an example? How would they check it? What would happen if one condition changed?

Consider a short worked example in a biology lesson:

Teacher: Why do plants need sunlight?
Student: For photosynthesis.
Teacher: Correct. What would happen to a plant kept in a dark cupboard for two weeks?
Student: It would die?
Teacher: Would it die immediately? What might you see first?
Student: It might go pale. Maybe it would grow towards any light gap.
Teacher: How could we test that idea?

The first answer was correct but shallow. Four questions later, the student is predicting, observing and designing an experiment. That is the difference between recalling a fact and understanding a concept.

Depth-oriented questions map naturally onto higher levels of thinking. If you want a structured way to plan them, our practical guide to Bloom's taxonomy shows how to move questions from remembering towards analysing, evaluating and creating.

Strategy 3: Co-Constructing Success Criteria for Student Ownership

In most classrooms, students find out what good work looks like after they have handed it in, when the marked paper comes back. Pandey argues this is backwards.

"Students learn more when they are a part of the defining of what good work looks like before even they start the work, not after." (Manish Pandey)

Co-constructing success criteria means building the rubric with your students, on the board, before they begin the task. It takes ten to fifteen minutes. It changes how students approach the work.

Here is a simple sequence for a persuasive writing task:

1. Show two samples. One strong, one weak. Do not label them.
2. Ask students to compare. "Which is more convincing? Why?"
3. Capture their reasons. Students might say: "It gives evidence", "It answers the other side", "It has a clear opening."
4. Shape them into criteria. Group similar ideas together and refine the language with the class.
5. Add anything essential they missed. If no one mentions structure, ask a guiding question until someone does.
6. Keep the criteria visible while students work, and use them for peer and self-assessment.

The result is a rubric students understand because they wrote it. They know the target before they aim. When they review their own drafts, they are checking against standards they helped define, not guessing what the teacher wants.

This strategy also builds every layer of Pandey's framework at once. It is good pedagogy (Layer 1). It signals respect and trust (Layer 2). And it shifts students from people who are judged into people who can judge quality themselves (Layer 3). That shift, from dependence on the teacher's verdict to ownership of standards, is exactly the kind of irreversible change Pandey describes.

Where This Leaves You

Becoming the best teacher in your school is not about winning the appraisal. It is about what remains in your students long after they have forgotten your syllabus. Pandey's framework gives that idea a structure: build visible excellence as your foundation, create emotional safety above it, and aim every lesson at the kind of change that cannot be undone.

Start small. Ninety seconds of connection at the start of class. One misconception to open a lesson. One follow-up question after a correct answer. One rubric built with your students. Audit your habits at the end of the term and keep what works.

None of this happens in a single workshop. Mastery takes deliberate practice, feedback and a structure that grows with you. That is why we built our programmes, including the Professional Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning (PgCTL), around reflective classroom practice rather than one-off training. If you are weighing your next qualification, our comparison of B.Ed vs PgCTL and our guide to the best teaching certifications for career growth will help you decide.

You already hold the most powerful lever in education. The work now is to use it on purpose.

For the Love of Teaching.