Professional Qualities of a Teacher

Every profession asks something particular of the people in it. A doctor must understand illness and treatment. A farmer must understand soil, seed and weather. A teacher is also a professional, and a teacher's main occupation is study and teaching: studying so that they keep learning themselves, and teaching so that others learn. To do this work well, a teacher needs good professional qualities and also a sound knowledge of the academic side of education.

What must a teacher know about? The subject matter, child psychology, the social and educational situation, teaching methods and the process of evaluation. From this knowledge and skill come ten professional qualities that a good teacher should have.

A teacher must know the subject they teach deeply. Imagine a science teacher who does not properly understand photosynthesis. However well that teacher speaks, and however neatly they draw on the board, what reaches the students will be wrong or incomplete. Skill and style cannot do their work without knowledge of the subject underneath them.

An unqualified doctor is a danger to a patient. An unqualified teacher can be a danger to the whole nation, because the students who follow that teacher will one day hold responsible positions and build the country. A child taught wrongly today may become the officer, engineer or teacher who decides wrongly tomorrow. That is why a good teacher must have a strong command of the subject they teach.

Knowing a subject is not the same as being able to teach it. Suppose two teachers know the same maths lesson equally well. One reads the formula from the book and copies it on the board. The other asks the class questions, gives an example from a shop or a field, and lets the students try the problem before showing the answer. The second teacher's students understand far more, and that difference is teaching skill.

Teaching techniques change with time, so a good teacher keeps taking up new ones and uses them to make students keen to study. Good teaching skill is also what brings out the talent that lies hidden inside each student.

Another important quality is knowledge of child psychology. A teacher needs to understand five things about each child:

• Level: how old the child is and how much the child already knows.
• Wishes: what the child wants to do or to become.
• Interests: what the child enjoys.
• Nature: whether the child is quiet, lively, shy or outgoing.
• Tendencies: the habits the child shows and the way the child usually reacts.

A child in class 1 cannot sit still and listen for long, and learns quickly through games, songs and pictures. A student in class 9 enjoys arguing a point, discussing and finding things out. A teacher who teaches both in the same way will fail with at least one of them. A teacher without knowledge of child psychology cannot teach well. With it, a teacher can:

• choose content that suits the children;
• adopt a suitable teaching method;
• follow a suitable teaching process, so that the teaching becomes well organised.

A teacher must stay informed about every part of the education system the country follows. National aims, expected competencies, the curriculum and the ways students are evaluated and examined are all revised from time to time. Suppose the way a subject is assessed changes, so that part of the marks now comes from project work and class participation. A teacher who has not noticed keeps preparing students the old way, and the students lose marks they could have earned. Only by knowing the system, and the policies, rules and procedures inside it, can a teacher make teaching produce real results.

A good teacher feels responsible. Such a teacher is loyal to the profession and teaches with a positive attitude. A teacher who cannot feel proud of being a teacher will not put real effort into the work, and a teacher who does not carry out their duties faithfully cannot be said to have a sense of responsibility at all.

A teacher is answerable to the school and, above all, to the students' learning. A teacher who reaches class on time, checks homework and returns it, and notices the student who is falling behind and gives extra help, is showing responsibility. Only a responsible teacher can bring students to the learning outcomes expected of them.

A teacher needs to know a range of teaching methods and teaching materials, including new ones. No single method suits every lesson. A poem is best learnt by reciting it, a science lesson by doing an experiment, a history lesson through a story or a discussion. To choose the right method, a teacher draws on three things:

• the nature of the subject or the lesson;
• how well and how quickly the children are able to learn;
• the whole teaching environment, such as the size of the class, the time available and what resources are at hand.

The same is true of materials. A teacher must know how to use a material to suit the content, and which material serves which aim. The curriculum sets the aims, the lesson content is the route to them, and a material chosen well helps students actually reach them.

Good materials do not have to be expensive. A teacher should also know how to make cheap, simple materials from what is found locally: pebbles or bottle caps for counting, clay for a model of hills and rivers, real leaves, flowers and roots for the parts of a plant, and the back of an old calendar for a chart.

A teacher should always be curious, wanting to know more, and studious, reading and learning all the time. New discoveries are made every day, and something a teacher learned years ago may already be out of date. Only a curious and studious habit keeps a teacher up to date, so a teacher should take an interest in new findings in every field.

While teaching towards the aims of the curriculum, a teacher should not stay inside the textbook alone. Plenty of reference books, newspapers and other materials should be read as well. When a student asks a question that goes beyond the textbook, such a teacher can answer with confidence.

A teacher is also an experimenter and a researcher. In subjects such as science, mathematics and computer science, experiments matter a great deal, and a teacher should always be thinking about how a subject can be taught practically. Rather than writing on the board which things sink and which float, a teacher can drop a stone, a piece of wood and a plastic lid into a bucket of water and let the students reach the answer themselves.

Reading about successful experiments and research in education is not enough. A teacher should be skilled at carrying out experiments and research personally. For example, a teacher might teach one section by group discussion and another by lecture, then compare which group learned more. Work like this turns the teacher into a researcher, and the students who see it grow a habit of finding out new things for themselves.

A teacher's job is not only to pass on what the teacher knows. It is also to bring out the talent that is already inside each student, and for that the teacher acts as a facilitator. To make children want to learn, a teacher has to understand how learning actually happens.

In traditional teaching, students were made to learn by rote, like a parrot repeating words: they memorised lines word for word without understanding them. Since then other methods have been researched and developed, and a teacher needs to know about them.

If the learning process goes wrong, students do not learn what they are meant to learn. So a teacher should put the stress on student-centred teaching. To be successful, a teacher must know the rules, the processes and the principles by which learning takes place.

Knowing about extracurricular activities is another important professional quality. Alongside classroom teaching, a teacher should be able to get students taking part in activities beyond the lesson, because without such activities a student's personal development cannot take place.

No two people have the same interests. A girl who hardly speaks in class may be a gifted artist. A boy with average marks may be the one who leads the football team. To spot these interests and guide each student well, a teacher needs the knowledge and skill to run co-curricular activities, the ones linked to lessons such as a science exhibition, as well as extracurricular ones.