John S. Mayher
Professor, English Education
"My goal has been not only to teach teachers how to teach better, but prepare teachers to teach under-prepared students in colleges and high schools."
'One of the wonderful things about teaching is that it is so difficult even good teachers never get really good at it. Every year there are new questions to answer, new challenges that will push you to improve,' says John Mayher, recipient of New York University's 1999 Distinguished Teaching Medal.
Mayher has spent his higher-education career as a teacher-educator. He began teaching junior high and high school, and though he found his work rewarding, Mayher decided that he could make a broader impact on the lives of students by working directly with their teachers.
'Teacher education like teaching itself is undervalued,' he says. 'But those of us who do it believe we can touch the future generations to come. My goal has been not only to teach teachers how to teach better, but prepare teachers to teach under-prepared students in colleges and high schools. This has made an impact on city colleges, as well as colleges around the country.'
Mayher's book, Uncommon Sense: Theoretical Practice in English Education (Boynton/Cook, 1990), received the 1991 David Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English. In it Mayher urges teachers to abandon the ordinary, unfounded 'common sense' assumptions that underlie many of their unproductive teaching practices. He believes that unless wrong-headed 'commonsense' beliefs become subject to discussion and debate, they'll never be abandoned.
To that end Mayher encourages his students to find their own voice, talk to each other, and explore their own ideas, and challenge their assumptions. His students also get feedback from one-on-one meetings with their teacher and through his written responses to their 'dialogue journal' entries. Mayher's students often adopt this open-ended form of writen interaction to communicate and connect with their own students.
A recipient of the prestigious 1998 Distinguished Service Award from the National Council of Teachers of English, Mayher believes that teaching is the 'world's noblest profession.' The fact that 65 books have been published by his former students attests to the power of his mentoring.
John S. Mayher's complete faculty bio.