Can Teaching Be Taught?

My mother believed that people either have being a teacher in them or not. You still need to learn how to become a great teacher and can benefit from training, especially in the classroom under the tutelage of an experienced teacher, but if you don't have being a teacher in you, training to become one is a huge challenge. She did experience would-be teachers overcome this challenge, however, so it is possibe. 

With this in mind, I wonder what this Leader in The Economist would prompt my mother to say with its premise that quality teachers matter most to a good education and, fortunately, teaching can be taught.

Here is the leader from The Economist's take. 

The article this Leader sets up delves a bit further into the natural-born versus well-trained teacher idea:

 "Elizabeth Green, the author of “Building A Better Teacher”, calls this the “myth of the natural-born teacher”. Such a belief makes finding a good teacher like panning for gold: get rid of all those that don’t cut it; keep the shiny ones. This is in part why, for the past two decades, increasing the “accountability” of teachers has been a priority for educational reformers."

Consistent with Mrs Neu's view, though, more focus on classroom training is key: 

 "In America and Britain training has been heavy on theory and light on classroom practice. Rod Lucero of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), a body representing more than half of the country’s teacher-training providers, says that most courses have a classroom placement. But he concedes that it falls short of “clinical practice”. After finishing an undergraduate degree in education “I didn’t feel I was anywhere near ready,” says Jazmine Wheeler, now a first-year student at the Sposato Graduate School of Education, a college which grew out of the Match charter schools in Boston."

On one thing my mother would surely agree, that is, the power of good teaching is immense:

 "Thomas Kane of Harvard University estimates that if African-American children were all taught by the top 25% of teachers, the gap between blacks and whites would close within eight years. He adds that if the average American teacher were as good as those at the top quartile the gap in test scores between America and Asian countries would be closed within four years."