This is a direct quote from Eisner’s book, The Educational Imagination. I recommend the book for all teachers.

On the Art of Teaching

Four Senses of the Art of Teaching

There are at least four senses in which teaching can be considered an art. First, it is an art in that teaching can be performed with such skill and grace that, for the student as well as for the teacher, the experience can be justifiably characterized as aesthetic (see Dewey, Art as experience, 1934).

…Second, teaching is an art in that teachers, like painters, composers, actresses and dancers, make judgments based largely on qualities that unfold during the course of action.

…Third, teaching is an art in that the teacher’s activity is not dominated by prescriptions or routines but is influenced by qualities and contingencies that are unpredicted.

…Fourth, teaching is an art in that the ends it achieves are often created in process….teaching is a form of human action in which many of the ends achieved are emergent- that is to say, found in the course of interaction with students rather than preconceived and efficiently attained.

…It is in these four senses- teaching as a source of aesthetic experience, as dependent on the perception and control of qualities, as a heuristic or adventitious activity, and as seeking emergent ends – that teaching can be regarded as an art.

…Because teaching can be engaged in as an art is not to suggest that all teaching can be characterized as such. Teaching can be done as badly as anything else. It can be wooden, mechanical, mindless, and wholly unimaginative. But when it is sensitive, intelligent, and creative – those qualities that confer on it the status of an art- it should, in my view, not be regarded as it so often is by some, as an expression of unfathomable talent or luck but as an example of humans exercising the highest levels of their intelligence. … (pp. 154 – 156).

Eisner, E. (1994). On the art of teaching (pp.154-170). In the educational imagination.

NY: McMillan.