A Good Teacher Should:
Be able to relate to the students and enjoy working with them,
Be friendly,
Have creativity,
Be able to adapt to a situation,
Have a passion for teaching,
Be someone who truely cares about her students,
Be someone who recognises that not all students in the class will learn and work the same way and be willing to accomodate that in the classroom,
Be able to admit that they do not know something and be able to work with the students to learn,
Be able to encourage the students,
Have good communication skills,
Be organised,
Know how to used the technology in the classroom and use it to further students learning,
Understand how people/students learn,
Have a good understanding of content knowledge in the subjects that they are teaching,
Be someone who is constantly learning so that she can be better; by learning professional content and learining from her students,
Encorporate her students interests into their learning if it is possible,
Be able to have a good balance between being a teacher, facilitator and friend to her students,
Encourage students in areas other than the academic, in things such as being a good citizen and all that it means,
Be able to encourage students to want to learn,
Have a good balance between using worksheets and having the students investigate a topic on their own with the teacher as a facilitator,
Be able to stream the lesson to all the levels of the students in the grade,
Be able to ask leading, probing questions (following Blooms Taxonomy),
Be honest with herself and her students,
Have the respect of the class,
Be open minded,
Be patient.
My own school years were filled with some pretty good and inspiring teachers. I went to Primary School at Wallan Primary School. I think that the best teacher that I had there was my grade 6 teacher. She really encouraged me to do my best. She saw that I had a passion for writing and so organised for me to enter the Nestle write around Australia contest in which I ended up being a zone finalist in, she also encouraged me in maths, I was really good in maths in primary school that year. Sadly that is not something that carried on for the rest of my school career.
I had a lot of good teachers in High School as well; I went to Broadford Secondary College and had some average teachers and some good ones. I’ll only talk about the good ones here though, one of my teachers I had for a class every single year bar one, he was a history and English teacher and he taught me for both of those subjects. He always said that if you don’t know something then that is ok and to just say that so you can get help and overall was very encouraging. In year 12 I took Australian History by distance education because there was not enough people interested so he took me and the other student who did the subject once a week and went over the information with us which was fantastic of him and I was very grateful for.
Another teacher that was good I also had for quite a few years at high school, she was fantastic and everyone thought that she was a great teacher. The one thing that I think is best about my teachers in high school is that theyalways said that if a student didn’t understand the way that they explained things that they would not be offended if the student asked another teacher because their jobs were to help the students and make sure that they understood what they were being taught. I like that attitude towards teaching.
I want to be the kind of teacher that the kids like and feel that they can really connect with and learn something from. I think that to be an effective teacher you really need to use different methods of teaching and to recognise that not all students learn the same way. You also need to keep an eye on all of the students, especially the quiet ones as it is important that a student is not left behind academically or socially. At the end of the day I want to be a teacher who can inspire a student and encourage them to be the best that they can possibly be.
My Dad sometimes quotes the saying that "If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, If you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime". I think that it is an appropriate quote to mention here. A teacher can't just give her students the answers, she must teach them how to learn.