She was a remarkable teacher by any standard. In a sense she was a teacher’s teacher.  Let me explain.  I came across her briefly in one of our primary schools late one afternoon recently, when many are winding down for the end of the school day.

Ends of lessons and ends of days are a much debated issue in school staffrooms where teaching and learning are taken seriously.

was set running to the delight of her Year 5 pupils.  Unobtrusively, with a conspiratorial glance which was silently and smilingly acknowledged by the miscreant who was fiddling in abstracted concentration with it while his mind was elsewhere, she delicately removed the pencil-holder from a nearby table.

The rest of the class were too busy listening to notice. The whole class was in rapt attention to the peer group’s tape work.  The group’s task seemed to have involved researching the first moon landing and then creating a tap ‘faction’ - in this case their own series of interviews with other pupils taking on the roles of the famous astronauts.

The teacher raised her hand.  At the sign, the child depressed the stop button.  There then followed the most persistent, almost contagious irresistible, quick fire questioning of the group who had created the tape to that point.  Discussion of fact and opinion on possible courses of action which had led to the trip and of the trip itself bounced and flowed around the classroom and from her inspired teaching members of other groups – there had clearly been more than one – joined in as “spokespersons’ for their colleagues’ discoveries.

Her hand was raised once more and the tape restarted.  We were into the next phase, which involved another group in charge of ground control for the space exploration, who had put together the next piece of the programme.  But then just as it had started her hand was up again, “I am sorry Class 5,” she said, “it’s the end of the day, it’s time to go home”. There was a groan of collective disappointment quickly assuaged by her look.  “Tomorrow” she declared predictably, “we will have episodes two, three and four.  We will start a little earlier if we all get our discovery done.  We must get through the whole piece by the end of the week... maybe we will miss afternoon break”.  “Yes Miss Let’s”, came more than one voice.

What is special about this teacher in one of our inner-city schools, where there are high levels of poverty and disadvantage?  Make no mistake about it, she walks with genius.  That is why I say she is a teacher’s teacher.  Just as top golfers, tennis players, cricketers, footballers, practitioners in all sports can tell you appreciatively of outstanding talent among their colleagues, so too can teachers.  The difference is, of course, that leading sports people receive a King’s ransom in wages and wide public acclaim – even adoration - while the super teacher has to make do with an anonymous life.  If Eric Cantona is worth £l0,000 a week, the teacher I saw in Small Heath is worth twice that amount.

There was a pace and urgency about the teacher’s mind and a calmness about her movement which was a formidable combination.  You see it sometimes when visiting primary classrooms.  It is not so much that such teachers resent your visits, rather that they see you as a possible further resource for learning, or as a spectator who will soon see the urgency of the business in hand.  It was quite simply as good an end to a school day as I have ever seen.  Indeed, ends of lessons and end of school days, as I have remarked earlier, are a topic worth debating in their own right. A respected Junior colleague of mine of many years standing tells me that she always indulges her interest in enthralling stories.  “It lures them on, you see, wherever they are with their reading development” she declares.  “I have a lot of old favourites - and many new ones with the expansion of high quality children’s literature these days which I doctor to make sure the pace is urgent and the vocabulary mind-stretching on occasion with a story which is magnetic”.   She went on, “So long as you end each day’s episode on a point of suspense, that is the vital bit. Then you reduce any chance of absenteeism. They cannot wait to hear the next bit and of course sometimes the class choose their alternative endings”.

Maurice Galton a decade or more ago, in the Oracle study of late Junior and early Secondary teaching practices, still speaks of an outstanding practitioner who defies his analysis.  “She practises a kind of studied unpredictability in her teaching” he confided to me not long ago.  Apparently she even used the children’s dismissal at the end of a lesson by setting the whole class to debate the criteria to be used as each ‘table’ left the room. For her class, ends of lessons were a medley of mental arithmetic one week, vocabulary games the next and a variety of going “joyously”, “sadly” and “seriously-and-worriedly” the next.

School life for her pupils, as it was for those in the class of my young friend in Small Heath, is one long unpredictable and stimulating journey of discovery and learning.  The pupils do not know it yet - they will one day of course ... that they are privileged to be taught by a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michaelangelo of our profession.  We need to know more about them – what makes them tick, what they do that makes other teachers respect them.  That is why the National Primary Centre’s recently announced invitation to schools and teachers to nominate examples of interesting practice for an award scheme is so welcome.  It is time we celebrated our outstanding colleagues: we can learn so much from them.