5 Essential Qualities of an Effective Teacher

Teaching is a rewarding profession as it gives you the opportunity to shape young minds. If you want to become a teacher, enrolling for a Bachelor in Education (B.Ed.) will help you acquire the skills of the trade. But what are the essential qualities of an effective teacher?

Think back to the time you were in school. Recall the teacher whose classes you enjoyed attending the most. Also, remember the teacher who made you tremble and wonder what the ‘Dickens is he talking about’. Both teachers probably were qualified professionals, yet one had the ability to engage your attention class after class, and the other made you feel as if you had been sent to school to experience some form of cerebral torture.

What made one different from the other? The answer is simple – the first person was an effective teacher and the second wasn’t.

If you are a young person aspiring to become a teacher, apart from the technical qualification you need to acquire, you must also assess whether you have what it takes to become an effective teacher. While some traits of being an effective teacher are inherent (e.g. the amount of passion you feel about teaching), other qualities can be consciously developed.

So before you take the decision to pursue teaching as a career, here’s a look at the qualities of an effective teacher.

1. Enjoys teaching

Teaching may not be your sole passion in life, but it certainly has to be something you enjoy. In the words of Paulo Coelho, the highly noted Brazilian lyricist and novelist, “When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

Unless you truly enjoy the process of teaching, you cannot sustain the high energy needed to be an effective teacher. Before you enrol for a B.Ed. the best way to assess if teaching is for you is to work as a part-time teacher at a school. You could also determine your inclination for teaching by working as a private tutor for a while.

2. Truly cares about students

As a teacher, you are dealing with astute young minds, who can easily tell if you are interested in teaching them, or if are you just trying to get over the lesson plan. It’s easy to get lost in the routine of classes and exams and lose focus on getting to know your students individually. Of course, while one does not want to get too personally involved with their students, it’s important to understand their background, and individual strengths and weaknesses. If you are teaching the higher classes, you must know your student’s academic and career aspirations. Knowing all this will help you in understanding how to motivate your students.

An effective teacher goes above and beyond to ensure that each of their students is successful. They are concerned about the welfare of all students, not just the students who score high grades. You must encourage students who have failed a class, to understand that failure is a part of life. What is more important is how they bounce back.

3. Open-mindedness to do things differently

To be an effective teacher, you must be willing to think out-of-the-box. Firstly, children respond to stimuli differently, which means that your teaching style may work for 90% of the students, but the remaining 10% will need a different approach. Secondly, teaching is an evolving art. The way children are taught today is different from standard teaching practices just a decade ago. The use of technology in education has been perhaps the biggest change. Your open-mindedness in trying new approaches to teaching will be a real boon for your students.

4. An excellent communicator

You should be able to communicate with your students in a way they can understand. To communicate effectively with your students, you must have the following characteristics –

• You should be passionate about your subject. If you are an English teacher, you must help your students appreciate the beauty of the language.
• You must teach in a manner that helps students relate to the information. For instance, if you teach Chemistry, help your students understand the everyday uses of chemistry.
• You must modulate your voice and body language to engage the students

5. Focused on self-improvement

An effective teacher continually strives to make themselves better in every aspect of their craft. As a teacher, you must keenly follow the developments in your subject and read as much new material as possible. Improving your knowledge base will help you correlate information for your students a lot better.

There are a host of online educational tools that can be used to make learning more interactive. Depending on the willingness of the school you are teaching at to adopt new technologies, you should be keen to learn newer ways of teaching.

You should actively engage in dialogue with your peers, and especially the senior teachers, to learn from their experience. An effective teacher sees real value in participate in teaching seminars and enrolling for short courses to improve their understanding of the educational field.

As a teacher, everything you say and do impacts your students. And the happier your students are, the more content you will feel about your work. Hopefully these points will give you enough food for thought in your decision to becoming a teacher.