The four qualities
a teacher needs are creativity, flexibility, insightfulness, and dedication. There are many other qualities which a good
teacher embodies, but these are the four that I wanted to focus on.
It is very important
to be a creative teacher. Children are
going to get bored very easily if every class is exactly the same. The monotony of the class might even cause
them to begin to dislike it. Taking the course
material and coming up with different ways to present it is an excellent skill
to have. A geometry teacher, for
example, could teach students about translations, rotations, and reflections by
actually bringing in shapes and having a lesson that revolves around group work
where the students need to move the shapes in real space and trace how the
shapes got from one place to another.
This might be extremely effective for some students who are hands-on
learners, and will get the whole class involved in the activity instead of just
passively listening to someone talk about moving shapes in a Cartesian
plane. If the students have been going
from lecture to lecture all day this kind of activity would be very fun to them
and they will probably take a lot away from it.
The ability to be
flexible is crucial as well. Planning at
home a lesson could seem to the teacher to be the best lesson that the world
has ever seen, but then when it is actually implemented in the classroom it
might not go as well as expected. The
teacher needs to be willing to change things if they don’t go as planned. Being flexible around how lessons are taught
and presented will only help benefit the students’ learning. Being able to change things on the fly and
having a back up plan is another very important part of this quality.
A teacher also
needs to be very insightful. When any
teacher asks “And now are there any questions?”, he or she is met with silence
the majority of the time. Whether
students just don’t want to ask a question, or don’t want to let their friends
know they don’t understand something, there is a stigma against asking a
question in front of the class. Knowing
this, a teacher needs to be able to pick up on different non-obvious clues from
the students to assess their absorption of the material. When a teacher is done explaining something
if he or she can recognize puzzled looks, then he or she might do another
example or explain something in different words to help the students who might
be lost while avoiding the dreaded “Are there any questions?”. Insightfulness can carry beyond the
educational realm as well. If a teacher
can pick up on a student having a bad day, the teacher can conduct themselves
differently to help with that situation.
Even if the student doesn’t want to talk about what is wrong, if a
person can realize that someone else is stressed then they can avoid doing
anything to worsen things.
Finally a teacher
needs dedication. Teaching is not easy
work. There is always more planning to be done, more lessons to be created or
re-worked, and more students in need of extra help. A teacher needs to be willing to put in the
time, effort, and energy on a daily basis to deal with all these tasks. A teacher who isn’t dedicated only hurts the
students. If a teacher helps the first
three students with questions perfectly, then gets tired of answering the same
questions and begins to give lackluster explanations then every student after
the first three suffers. Being a teacher
should be looked at as a commitment.
Teachers should be teachers even if it’s not school hours, looking for
new methods of instruction or thinking about ways to help everyone in their
class successfully master the lessons.
