There are some conversations that end when the phone call ends. Others continue long after the voice at the other end has fallen silent.
A conversation I had this morning with an energetic and widely respected principal of a higher secondary school in a far-flung part of South Kashmir has stayed with me. With the Teachers’ Day celebration, our conversation naturally turned towards the annual ritual of recognising teachers for exemplary contribution to education.
Her concern was not about any particular teacher who might be selected. Nor was it an accusation against those involved in the process. It was a more fundamental question about how we recognise excellence. How do we know who the best teacher is?” It is a deceptively simple question.
Every September, we celebrate teachers with ceremonies, citations, bouquets and speeches about teachers as the architects of the nation. Yet beneath the applause lies a more uncomfortable question: how does a system actually discover exceptional teaching? We have become reasonably good at celebrating teachers. We may be less accomplished at seeing them. That distinction matters.
A teacher can be asked to document achievements, submit evidence, describe innovations and assemble a professional portfolio. There is nothing inherently wrong with such a process. Documentation can bring invisible work into view, create a record of professional contribution and make recognition more transparent. But teaching is an unusually difficult profession to reduce to evidence on paper.
A portfolio can tell us what a teacher has done. It may demonstrate outcomes, activities and initiatives. But can it tell us what happened inside a child’s mind when a teacher finally made learning possible?
Who documents the teacher who stays back after school to help one child read? Who records the teacher who notices that a child has stopped participating—not because she has become “lazy”, but because something is troubling her at home? Who measures the moment when a boy who has quietly accepted the label of “weak student” raises his hand and discovers, perhaps for the first time, that he can be right? Who records the teacher who persuades an irregular child to return to school?
And who nominates the teacher who has spent years doing these things without thinking of them as achievements?
Perhaps this is where our Teachers’ Day conversation needs to move: from recognising visible achievement to discovering invisible excellence.
There is an uncomfortable paradox here. The teacher who is most accomplished at documenting excellence may not necessarily be the teacher whose classroom embodies its deepest form. Some teachers know how to prepare impressive portfolios. Some know how to present innovations attractively. Some are naturally articulate about their accomplishments.
Others simply teach. They enter their classrooms, meet their children, improvise with limited resources, explain the same concept for the fourth time, encourage the hesitant, support the struggling, speak to parents, mentor younger colleagues, manage the unexpected and return the next morning to do it all again.
Their finest lesson may not have a photograph. Their most consequential intervention may not have a certificate. Their most successful teaching strategy may never have been uploaded anywhere. And their greatest innovation may be something as unfashionable as patience. This becomes particularly significant in Jammu and Kashmir, where schools operate in sharply different social, geographical and institutional circumstances.
A teacher in a relatively well-resourced urban school does not begin from the same starting point as a teacher working with children in a remote mountain community, a difficult geographical setting or a socially disadvantaged environment. Context matters.
A child who arrives at school with books, digital access, parental support and a quiet place to study does not present the same educational challenge as a child whose learning is interrupted by economic hardship, household responsibilities, distance, irregular attendance or limited educational support at home. Yet systems sometimes compare outcomes without adequately comparing circumstances. If recognition is based predominantly on what can be conveniently documented, we risk rewarding visibility rather than impact.
The most visible achievement is not always the most consequential one. This is where the Hindi film Hichki, starring Rani Mukerji, offers an illuminating metaphor. The film should not be treated as a blueprint for teacher-award systems, but its educational imagination is worth recalling. Its protagonist, Naina Mathur, lives with Tourette syndrome, whose involuntary vocal and motor tics become the “hiccups” through which others initially see her. Yet the deeper obstacle is not simply the neurological condition. It is the prejudice, discomfort and institutional assumptions surrounding it.
The metaphor travels beyond disability. Education, too, has its hichkis. We sometimes mistake conformity for excellence. We confuse examination performance with learning. We mistake silence for discipline and compliance for engagement. We allow social privilege to masquerade as merit. We may include children physically while excluding them socially. And sometimes we recognise the teacher who presents success beautifully while overlooking the teacher who quietly creates it.
The film also challenges an old educational assumption: that teaching is primarily the transmission of information. Its protagonist moves towards experiential and student-centred approaches, turning familiar surroundings and everyday experiences into opportunities for understanding. The larger proposition is powerful: perhaps children do not always need to be forced into the mould of the system; sometimes the system needs to reconsider the way it teaches them.
There is another insight here that deserves to be carried into our discussion of teacher excellence. A great teacher does not merely change what a child knows. A great teacher can change what a child believes about what is possible. That is a profound educational intervention—and an almost impossible one to quantify. When a child is repeatedly told, directly or indirectly, that she is weak, troublesome, incapable or destined to fail, those judgements can become part of her self-image. Expectations are not merely spoken; they are often absorbed. But the reverse can also happen.
A teacher who repeatedly communicates belief in a child’s capacity can alter the child’s relationship with learning. Hesitation can become participation. Defensiveness can give way to curiosity. Failure can become an event rather than an identity.
This is one of the least visible forms of great teaching. It may never produce an impressive spreadsheet. It may never fit neatly into an award citation. Yet it can remain with a child for decades. Can an annual award application capture such work? Perhaps partly. But probably not completely. That is why the question raised in that morning conversation deserves to become an institutional conversation.
What if teacher excellence were not discovered primarily when an award cycle opened, but observed, nurtured and recognised throughout the academic year? Imagine a credible system of professional observation in which promising teachers are identified through multiple channels; their classrooms are observed; students are listened to; colleagues and school leaders are consulted; evidence of learning is examined; and the social and institutional context of the school is taken seriously.
The purpose need not be surveillance. It could be accompaniment. The distinction is crucial. Observation need not mean waiting for a teacher to make a mistake. It can mean entering a classroom with the more generous question: What is this teacher doing that is helping children learn, and what can we learn from it? The teacher receives feedback. The teacher reflects. The teacher experiments. The teacher improves. And sustained evidence of such professional growth can eventually inform recognition.
No system will eliminate subjectivity. Peer assessments can be biased. Student feedback can reflect popularity. Classroom observations can be imperfect. Committees can make mistakes. But that is an argument for stronger processes, not for abandoning the attempt to see excellence.
A richer model could allow recommendations from several directions—teachers themselves, colleagues, school leaders, students, parents and, where appropriate, the wider community. Different forms of evidence could be considered. Most importantly, the context in which the teacher works could become part of the assessment.
The teacher who transforms a difficult classroom should not disappear behind the statistics of a more advantaged setting. The teacher who helps five struggling children cross a learning threshold should not automatically appear less successful than one whose students arrived with considerable educational advantages. The teacher serving quietly in a remote school should not have to become a skilled publicist merely to become visible. And recognition should reward sustained excellence, not simply the ability to narrate excellence convincingly.
This is not an argument against self-nomination. On the contrary, self-nomination can protect teachers from being overlooked by indifferent institutions. Teachers deserve the right to present their work, particularly where local hierarchies or personal biases might otherwise determine who gets noticed. The issue is not whether teachers should speak about their work. The issue is whether speaking about one’s work should become the principal condition for being seen.
There is a subtle danger whenever institutions begin measuring what is easiest to count. What can be photographed becomes more visible than what can only be experienced. What can be tabulated becomes more authoritative than what requires judgement. What can be narrated elegantly begins to compete with what is quietly lived.
Education should be especially wary of this tendency. After all, we spend much of our professional lives telling children that learning is more important than appearance. We tell them not to judge a book by its cover. We tell them that mistakes are part of learning, that effort matters, that curiosity matters, that every learner has potential. Perhaps our systems should occasionally submit themselves to the same lesson.
There is another dimension worth considering. The labels we place on teachers can become almost as limiting as the labels we place on children. “Excellent teacher.” “Weak teacher.” “Outstanding school.” “Poor-performing school.” “Bright child.” “Slow learner.” Categories are useful for administration. They become dangerous when they substitute for understanding. The wiser educational system does not merely classify. It observes, listens, understands and creates conditions for growth. That principle should shape how we recognise teachers as much as how we teach children.
Perhaps the real test of a teacher-award system is therefore not simply whether it produces deserving awardees. It is whether it creates a culture in which good teaching becomes increasingly visible to the profession itself. Awards should not merely crown individuals. They should help a system learn.
If a teacher has found an effective way to engage children who are habitually absent, what can other schools learn from that practice? If another has developed a simple strategy for helping struggling readers, can that knowledge travel? If a teacher in a remote school has achieved remarkable learning with very limited resources, can that experience challenge our assumptions about what educational improvement requires?
The most valuable award, perhaps, is one that does not end with a certificate. It begins a conversation. And perhaps this is ultimately what dignity in teaching requires—not only applause, but attention.
Teachers are often described as nation-builders, but that grand phrase can sometimes conceal the ordinary labour through which education actually happens. A nation is not built only in policy documents or inaugural functions. It is built in classrooms where a teacher patiently explains a difficult idea; in corridors where a child is persuaded not to give up; in conversations with parents; in the decision to give one more chance to a child who has already disappointed everyone. Much of this work is mundane. That is precisely why it is easy to overlook.
Great teaching does not always look spectacular while it is happening.
Sometimes it looks like repetition. Sometimes it looks like waiting. Sometimes it looks like listening. Sometimes it looks like changing the lesson because the first explanation did not work. Sometimes it looks like knowing when not to teach the textbook. And sometimes it looks like remembering the name of a child whom everyone else has stopped noticing. That is why the question “Who is the best teacher?” may itself need to be reframed. Perhaps the better question is: What does excellent teaching look like here, in this classroom, with these children, under these circumstances—and how do we become good enough at seeing it?
That question shifts the emphasis from competition to professional learning; from publicity to practice; from the award ceremony to the classroom. It also makes recognition more democratic. The best teacher may indeed be an extraordinary innovator. But she may also be the teacher who has served for years in the same remote school without publicity. He may be the teacher whose students achieve outstanding examination results.
But he may equally be the teacher whose greatest achievement is persuading a child on the edge of dropping out to remain in school. She may have written an impressive portfolio. Or she may possess nothing more impressive than the enduring gratitude of generations of children.
So, this September 5, let us celebrate those whose names appear on the award lists. They deserve recognition. But let us also think about those whose names never appear. The teacher in the village classroom. The teacher in the mountain school. The teacher who has no social-media presence. The teacher whose innovation has no fashionable name. The teacher whose most important achievement exists only in the changed confidence of a child.
The teacher who never applied. Perhaps the answer to the question “Who finds the teacher who never applies?” should not be another form, another committee or another circular. Perhaps the answer should be the system itself.
If we truly believe that teachers shape the future, then our institutions must become capable of seeing what teachers do when nobody is watching. Because the finest tribute to a teacher is not merely to honour a few once a year. It is to build an education system that learns how to see the teacher every day.
(The author is a teacher educator and educationist from Jammu and Kashmir whose work engages with pedagogy, teacher development and educational transformation. His writings bring together classroom experience and social reflection, examining how schools, teachers and public institutions can respond more humanely and meaningfully to the changing aspirations of society)
