A good teacher should love the people she will be teaching – be they adults or children. She should have knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject she will be teaching. She should be lateral thinking, flexible, warm and able to guide without being intrusive. A good teacher should be encouraging to the more advanced student. Nurturing to the more needy. She should be passionate about what she is doing, be aware of all aspects of ‘learning’ and should also herself be eager to learn and glean more knowledge for the growth of self and pupil. ‘Light and Life’
A-MM – educator
A good teacher is an educator in the fullest sense of the word i.e. someone who cares for each and every child – academic, social and emotional. That person should never be intrusive but at the same time must act when necessary. As regards the academic side the good teacher must encourage those in his care to think out of the box-lateral skills are essential. You know all about it with your wide range of interests.
Frank Simmonds – educator – ex head St Andrew’s School
A person who is passionate about what they do and who has great enthusiasm for the task. It goes without saying that a love of children or young people is a given as is a marked intellectual capacity for the discipline/subject that they are teaching. I hold firm on the importance of subject specialists at Roedean. I hope this helps. If teachers are passionate and love what they do, they will deal with all the other challenges that they face in the current educational climate.
Mary Williams – Educator – Head of Rodean
one who shows people where to find a beam of light that illuminates them and waits around till he/she sees their eyes glow?
Dorian Haarhoff – English Lecturer – Author
As a teacher and a trainer of teachers, I have a deep commitment to accountability and to what I believe that we can realistically hold teachers accountable for. Included on this list are:
- A classroom that provides the structure and discipline needed for effective learning
- Teacher knowledge of the subject, for teaching effectively
- A teacher’s personal commitment to work hard, to be caring, to be a learner, to be enthusiastic
- Paying attention to each child and treating each child fairly
- Working with students’ families to help children learn
The work of teaching and learning is more complex than we know. There is increasing discussion these days about "highly qualified teachers" as if that alone was going to solve all educational problems. Evaluation and testing, much emphasized today, do not turn poor students into good ones. They are not teaching tools. At best, they check in on what is test-able, not necessarily on what’s been learned. While good tests serve diagnostic functions, just as X-rays and MRI’s at the doctor’s, most testing in school is still used for grading and sorting purposes. Many test results don’t even come back until the end of the school year…too late to do any good.
Education is about the transfer of knowledge and "lighting the fire." This occurs in an environment that supports it. One of the biggest lessons I have learned as a teacher is about the extraordinary value of encouragement. This is often seen by "macho" politicians and educators as a soft and weak concept. Quite the opposite, encouragement is a key to educational improvement for teachers as well as students. And it is vastly underused.
Dorothy Rich – American Educator
Additions to this list invited