One of the most important jobs that anybody can do is the one where you are a teacher. Imparting wisdom onto the younger generation or even a generation of your peers is important if you want the world to be able to progress.
One thing to really know about teaching is that it’s not a job, it’s a vocation. This means that you really need to have a calling for it to be able to deal with the bureaucracy that can come with being a teacher.
Sorry if that has burst your teaching bubble, but any existing teacher will tell you that the red tape can be frustrating.
You can’t just be a teacher. You have to be a good teacher. You have to be a patient teacher. You have to be the kind of teacher who is willing to listen and teach the same lesson 50 times if it means that just one person understands your method. You need to be the kind of teacher that would come to class with a lesson plan template and know exactly what you want to do in advance.
Being a good teacher is something that your students will cherish for life. You want to be that teacher that pops up on Christmas memories where your student will one day say it’s because of you that they are who they are. Let’s take a look at 9 of the best qualities you need to be a good teacher.
Excellent communication skills.
The top quality any great teacher needs is the quality that allows them to communicate. It’s a critical asset to have in both personal and professional environments and it’s going to be the root of your success.
With strong communication skills with both your students and their families, you can build an excellent rapport and create the trusting environment that the student needs to feel like they can learn. You are going to be playing an integral part in the self-esteem of many different students, so you need to be able to communicate.
You need to be able to listen.
Being a teacher is not just standing in front of the class and talking to them until they fall asleep. Being a teacher means being able to sit and listen when your student is having a tough time understanding something. It’s being able to listen when they tell you that they’re struggling and not just with their schoolwork. Those who know, do and those who understand, teach.
A great teacher needs to be friendly.
Every single one of us has a story about the teacher who could instantly make a classroom go quiet when they walk in the room. We’ve all had the teacher that with a look can make you feel cut down to the size of a pinhead. You do not want to be that kind of teacher. You want to be friendly towards your students but friendly to the point where there is a definite boundary and everybody understands that boundary.
If you express friendliness with students and their families, you become more approachable which means that your students are going to trust you.
You need to be patient.
There are always going to be people who don’t learn the same way that you would teach, and there are always going to be situations in the classroom that mean you have to throw your teaching skills out the window and bring up your patience. A patient teacher is one that people want to learn from.
You need a strong work ethic.
As a teacher you are not just going to be working within the school day. In the morning before you go to the school you may be doing paperwork. Once the school bell goes at the end of the day, there will be even more paperwork and marking to do.
To be a teacher isn’t just to sit around for hours and hours of the day for many weeks of the year on vacation time. You are going to have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do and which means you need to have a strong work ethic to make sure that you can withstand it.
You have got to be organized.
There is no such thing as a disorganized teacher, because those teachers do not last. The school can be a battleground for a teacher, so you have to be a good organizer so that you can ensure that you play a central role in being a great teacher. Without organizational skills you can lose grasp of everything from tasks and expectations to deadlines.
You have to have preparation skills.
One of the best characteristics of a great teacher is their ability to prepare. Preparation is not just about paperwork and marking and tests, it’s preparing the classroom for the start of the year. It’s preparing the children to understand what you’re going to teach them and how you plan to teach it.
It’s preparing yourself to face several classes of children through the year and get to know every single name and every single face. There are a lot of things to repair in a classroom but yourself is the most important thing to prepare.
You have to know how to discipline.
Now, if you plan to follow a gentle parenting/gentle teaching method with your children this is excellent. Children are people and they matter. Teachers themselves, however, have to be disciplined so that they can stay on top of the paperwork that they have to do. You need to be able to harness the power of keeping a classroom of children under control.
This means that you need to be strong as a teacher. Take some classes and learn how to deal with crowd control – but don’t be the teacher that punishes people.
You need to accept everybody.
One of the best qualities a teacher can have is acceptance. You need to be open-minded and open to every type of child and every kind of environment, because not all children are going to have happy homes. If you don’t accept everybody from the office, you’re going to be a very well regarded and trusted teacher.