CTET : Qualities of a Good Teacher
— Henry Adams
The importance of a teacher in the life of a person is precious and immeasurable. A teacher is someone who inspires and guides the life of a kind in the school. S/he guides a student to the wonderland of knowledge, wisdom, and life. And this task is very significant. That is why it is important to know that what kind of personality a teacher ought to possess so that he/she could give a right direction and approach to his/her students.
Here we have explained some important characteristics which are very important for a teacher.
1. A 360- degree Personality
A teacher, especially for small students, must possess an overall personality which means s/he should be a good philosopher and psychologist. A philosopher inside a teacher will give the students a right way to think for themselves and he will guide them about living. And a Psychologist will understand the mental problems of the students. This way a teacher would be able to set the best environment in the classroom for learning, expressing and growing.
2. Communication
In the class room, a teacher explains, many topics of knowledge. So how a teacher communicates this knowledge with his/her students become very important. A teacher must be able to convey the knowledge to the students in a very simplest way. For that matter, the teacher must have a clear understanding of the knowledge which he is going to teach. And a teacher must communicate with such manner that s/he could inspire the desire to learn inside the students.
3.Tolerance and Flexibility
Tolerance and flexibility in a teacher’s behavior are very important traits. A teacher meets numerous students in his/her career. There are many kinds of students. Some of them might be hard to handle, some of them might do annoying things in the class, some of them might disturb the class. So while dealing with such problems tolerance and flexibility plays an important role in the behavior of a teacher.
The ways of learning can be different for students. So a teacher must have flexibility in his teaching style so that he can impart his knowledge smoothly to all students in the class.
4. Sense of Objectivity
A teacher must keep his outlook objective in his class. So that he could analyze the problems of students impersonally and rationally. It will also help a teacher not to personalize a student’s inability to cope in a classroom setting. The objectivity also helps a teacher to evaluate and guide a student in a proper way. Without objectivity, a teacher might get befuddled with the environment of his classroom and its problems.
5. Creativity and Humor
Creativity is an important virtue of any individual. And creativity in a profession like teaching becomes the even more important virtue. Keeping a student’s attention especially in kindergarten or first grade is difficult. Adapting classroom projects into fun ways of learning, or interesting challenges for students helps them “think outside the box” and develop their own creative learning processes. This teacher is less likely to ask all students to fit into a narrow framework for learning. Without a sense of humor, the teacher is not likely to survive student antics.
6. Listener
The teacher must be a good and attentive listener. The job of a teacher is not only listening but listening with attention and care. So that a student could feel s/he is involved and taken care of.And many children do have communication problem so listening skills of a teacher are essential for such students.
7. Patient yet Firm
A student can be slow in learning, slow in adapting and slow in evolving. So for such students, a teacher’s patience is very important. If a teacher is not patient he can react wrongly to such students which can be lethal for the self- confidence of such students.
The teacher often writes classroom rules on the board and/or may have a reward system to stimulate a desire for displaying good behavior. Patience comes in giving students time to absorb the reality of boundaries. Firmness is in correcting the student through reminders.
8. Setting a good example
Children learn more from actions than words. So the actions and activities of a teacher inspire a student more than anything. So a teacher must try to set good examples before students from his actions. This takes a certain amount of good moral character. Apart from it, a teacher requires displaying acceptable behavior in the community. Teachers need to maintain respectability in their lifestyle beyond the school grounds.
9. Motivating
Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said a teacher’s main task should not be only teaching knowledge to students, his main task should be to create love and interest inside the students for knowledge. So whatever subject a teacher would be teaching, he should, first of all, try to create love inside the students.
And this can be done by motivating students in finding their true interest and cultivating that.
Just as each student has a different set of interests, every student will have a correspondingly different set of motivators. Many (or most) students will be able to reconcile their own outlook and ambitions with what’s happening in the class and take motivation from that relationship. Unfortunately, some students will rely simply on external motivators, but worse, we’ve all run into students who really can’t find a relationship between what makes them tick and what’s happening in the classroom around them.
This is where the master teacher knows each of her students and helps them to contextualize the work they’re doing to allow the student to make a connection with something in his realm of interest.