They do the bare minimum required and very little more. The great teachers, however, work tirelessly to create a challenging, nurturing environment for their students. Great teaching seems to have less to do with our knowledge and skills than with our attitude toward our students, our subject, and our work.
Although this list is certainly not all-inclusive, I have narrowed down the many characteristics of a great teacher to those I have found to be the most essential, regardless of the age of the learner:.
A great teacher respects students. Students feel safe to express their feelings and learn to respect and listen to others. This teacher creates a welcoming learning environment for all students.
A great teacher creates a sense of community and belonging in the classroom. In this small community, there are rules to follow and jobs to be done and each student is aware that he or she is an important, integral part of the group. A great teacher lets students know that they can depend not only on her, but also on the entire class. A great teacher is warm, accessible, enthusiastic and caring. This person is approachable, not only to students, but to everyone on campus. This is the teacher to whom students know they can go with any problems or concerns or even to share a funny story.
Great teachers possess good listening skills and take time out of their way-too-busy schedules for anyone who needs them. If this teacher is having a bad day, no one ever knows—the teacher leaves personal baggage outside the school doors. A great teacher sets high expectations for all students. This teacher realizes that the expectations she has for her students greatly affect their achievement; she knows that students generally give to teachers as much or as little as is expected of them.
A great teacher has his own love of learning and inspires students with his passion for education and for the course material. He constantly renews himself as a professional on his quest to provide students with the highest quality of education possible.
A great teacher is a skilled leader. Different from administrative leaders, effective teachers focus on shared decision-making and teamwork, as well as on community building. This great teacher conveys this sense of leadership to students by providing opportunities for each of them to assume leadership roles.
This teacher assesses his teaching throughout the lessons and finds new ways to present material to make sure that every student understands the key concepts. A great teacher collaborates with colleagues on an ongoing basis.
Rather than thinking of herself as weak because she asks for suggestions or help, this teacher views collaboration as a way to learn from a fellow professional. A great teacher uses constructive criticism and advice as an opportunity to grow as an educator. A great teacher maintains professionalism in all areas —from personal appearance to organizational skills and preparedness for each day.
Her communication skills are exemplary, whether she is speaking with an administrator, one of her students or a colleague. The respect that the great teacher receives because of her professional manner is obvious to those around her. While teaching is a gift that seems to come quite naturally for some, others have to work overtime to achieve great teacher status.
Yet the payoff is enormous — for both you and your students. Imagine students thinking of you when they remember that great teacher they had in college! She also serves as an adjunct professor at Lindenwood University in St.
Charles, Missouri. This strikes me as a list of necessary but not sufficient conditions for being a great teacher. What makes a teacher great is reaching to present difficult content, ideas, debates, issues in a lucid, compelling way, time after time. A great teacher works hard to prepare, to think freshly about the material she's teaching, and to find current examples that will grab her students' interest.
A great teacher makes the classroom magic happen, regularly. She or he elicits her students' best efforts and engages their minds, so that they leave class still alive with ideas and comments, and they talk about what went on in class with their friends, roommates, family when they get home too.
Once in a while, something comes along that you want to carry with you, make a poster of and post it in your office; something you need to read every now and then to remind you of your destination, something to aspire and inspire. Today, your post was that "something". Thank you and thank you FacultyFocus. When the learning goes well, a great teacher ensures the students own this success. When it doesn't, the 'buck' lands firmly in the teacher's lap. When learning doesn't go well, it is not necessarily the teacher's fault.
I think the teacher has the responsibility to understand why it didn't go as well as hoped, but students are accountable for their own learning and often do not accept that responsibility. I agree with this completely. The teacher there taught kindergarten during the year, but she had been assigned to middle school students for the summer. She was from the neighborhood and Puerto Rican, like many of the students in the room. On the first day, she excited them, describing how she was learning to ride a motorcycle and what she loved about it.
Then she asked them each to share something they loved doing. Students liked her immediately, and there was a hopeful feeling in the room that this would be a great summer school experience. Beyond the first day, however, the teacher began assigning academic work that came from packets the school provided to her.
The work was pretty dull, and students started to push back in the ways adolescents are known to when they are bored or having difficulty. Teaching methods are critical to educational outcomes for students, and not all methods or curricula are equally effective. She made some sound pedagogical decisions: to spend time building connections with her students, giving them a structured way to speak about themselves, and listening to them with interest.
Not really. Rodriguez believes that awareness of all that goes into those interactions is at the center of successful teaching. Each is a continuum, and teachers develop them at varying rates.
This way of thinking about teaching makes a lot of sense to me. Great teaching requires an awareness of all of the factors at play in a particular moment, to take advantage of opportunities and anticipate and address challenges.
What jumps out at me most, though, is that awareness of self is as important in the framework as the awareness of learner or the awareness of teaching process. Generally in teacher preparation and professional development, the focus is on teaching practices and how we can understand our students as learners. But we are rarely called to look at our own identities.
They have an appreciation of how learning typically proceeds in a subject and of the kinds of misunderstandings learners commonly develop. Teachers know their students well: their individual interests, backgrounds, motivations and learning styles.
Schools should insist on the mastery of foundational skills, such as reading and numeracy, and also work to encourage high levels of critical thinking, creativity, problem solving and teamwork. They encourage students to accept responsibility for their own learning and teach them how to continue learning throughout life. To effectively teach all students, the teacher must understand this. The teaching and interactions with students must reflect the needs of each, with the understanding of each as an individual.
The stereotype of teaching is of someone standing up in front of a class talking. Unfortunately, because of that image, teaching is too often misinterpreted as being about the simple delivery of information.
So when politicians feel the urge to fix education, they typically focus on the information delivered to students. A typical refrain is that our education rankings would be better if we fixed the curriculum and delivered the right information. One way of teaching does not sit comfortably with theories of learning such as multiple intelligences and all that we know about the range of learning styles in every classroom.
It is clear that educational practices must go beyond simplistic views of telling as teaching and listening as learning if we are to genuinely pursue quality in schooling. They ask questions frequently to make sure students are following along. They keep students motivated with varied, lively approaches. Great teachers form strong relationships with their students and show that they care about them as people.
Great teachers are warm, accessible, enthusiastic and caring. Teachers with these qualities are known to stay after school and make themselves available to students and parents who need them. They are involved in school-wide committees and activities, and they demonstrate a commitment to the school. Great teachers are masters of their subject matter. They exhibit expertise in the subjects they are teaching and spend time continuing to gain new knowledge in their field.
They present material in an enthusiastic manner and instill a hunger in their students to learn more on their own. Great teachers communicate frequently with parents. They reach parents through conferences and frequent written reports home.
What No Child Left Behind means for teacher quality The role of the teacher became an even more significant factor in education with the passage of The No Child Left Behind law in Share on Pinterest. Get the GreatSchools newsletter — our best articles, worksheets and more delivered weekly. Sign up. Choosing the wrong college can be bad for mental health Choosing the wrong college can be bad for mental health.
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