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Great teaching is an art. In other arts—painting, sculpture, the writing of novels—great masters leverage a proficiency with basic tools to transform the rawest of material (stone, paper, ink) into the most valued assets in society. This alchemy is all the more astounding because the tools often appear unremarkable to others. Who would look at a chisel, a mallet, and a file and imagine them producing Michelangelo’s David?
Great art relies on the mastery and application of foundational skills, learned individually through diligent study. You learn to strike a chisel with a mallet. You refine the skill with time, learning at what angle to strike and how hard to drive the chisel. Years later, when and if your work makes it to a museum, observers will likely talk about what school of thought or theory it represents. They are far less likely to reflect on the degree to which proficiency with the chisel made the vision possible. But although lots of people conjure unique artistic visions, only those with an artisan’s skill can make them real. Behind every artist is an artisan.
And while not everyone who learns to drive a chisel will create a David, neither can anyone who fails to learn it do much more than make marks on rocks.

This is about the tools of the teaching craft. More specifically, it’s about the tools necessary for success in the most important part of the field: teaching in public schools, primarily those in the inner city, that serve students
born into poverty and, too often, to a rapidly closing window of opportunity. In these schools, the price of failure is high and the challenges immense. Teachers there work in a crucible where, most often, our society’s failures are paramount, self-evident, and overwhelming, but also where the kind of alchemy that changes
lives can and does occur. Unfortunately this alchemy happens too rarely and often without much fanfare. But in the hands of a small number of champion teachers and visionary principals who’ve managed to build classrooms and schools that successfully pry the window of opportunity back open, it happens reliably and
consistently. If you’re reading this and you’re a teacher who wants to improve your craft, my aim is to give you the tools to do that—to become one of those teachers who unlocks the latent talent and skill waiting in his or her students, no matter how many previous schools or classrooms or teachers have been unsuccessful
in that task.

Each technique. Not every teacher I observed uses every one of these techniques, but in the aggregate, the techniques that I include in this book emerge as the tools excellent teachers use to separate themselves from the merely good. There is a tool box for closing the achievement gap. Let me say, with a humility that is reinforced every time I walk into the classroom of the colleagues I describe in this section, that I am no champion teacher. Far from it. My task has not been to invent the tools but to describe how others use them and what makes them work. This has meant putting names on techniques in the interest of helping to create a common vocabulary with which to analyze and discuss the classroom. But I want to be clear. What appears here is neither mine, especially, nor a theory. It is a set of field notes from observations of the work of masters some of whom you will meet in this book, and many others you will not, but whose diligence and skill informed and inspired this work.