ABSTRACT
If you type “X Factor” into a search engine you get hundreds of hits on the television music programme developed by Simon Cowell. However, the term is also widely used to describe the personal qualities that make one person stand above all of the others in the particular sample. Teaching is no different. The authors of this book have observed thousands of teachers in thousands of operational classrooms, and like most of the readers, we could see the “X” or “Wow” factor very quickly. Importantly, the parents of the students can also see this in an instant.
In business and in education there is now a strong push to identify potential and talent, as can be seen in World Bank Group (Kraay, 2018) background paper on the World Bank Human Capital Index. It is interesting that talent identification in sport is far more advanced than in business and education, and this is because physical sport talent identification is far more linear. Look at the price that football clubs are prepared to pay for these “X- factor” players because they make a difference between winning and losing.
There is no shortage of templated descriptions of what “experts” think a catalytic teacher should look like, but catalytic teachers meet that situational amalgam where the context and the students’ need interplay. For us, when the X Factor teachers become respected resources for the other teachers, then they reach the status of catalytic teachers.
