Teaching is a lucrative profession. But, not everyone in this profession can benefit from these opportunities. If you want to do well in this field as a teacher, inculcate some intrinsic personality characteristics in you along with brushing up your professional skills. It will help you cover miles in your career.
Personality Traits of Good Teachers
Every profession has its own demand and requirements and teaching is no exception. Before brushing up your professional skills, you first need to work on the basic personality traits. These include:
Passion: You need passion to motivate children to learn and perform things which are acceptable, relevant and meaningful.
Communication: In order to understand students and class, you first need to have great communication skills. If you are a good listener with sharp memory, your job will become easy. You should encourage students to ask questions and be ready with responses.
Flexibility: You should be comfortable in creating a fine balance between leniency and strictness in classroom.
Style: A teacher is a role model of many students and hence, having a good personality is very important. It includes dressing sense, presentation and mannerisms.
Humor: Unlike teachers of yester years, you need to interact with your students in a lighthearted way. You need to be friendly. Sometimes, cracking harmless jokes is required. But again, you must use your discretion to judge a particular situation.
Care: You should be caring and loving towards kids. It will help you understand them and accordingly, teach them.
Leadership: Since you have the responsibility to mould the youth of today into confident and responsible citizens for tomorrow, you first need to inculcate leadership qualities in you. You must know to make utmost use of the available funds, resources and manpower.
Teamwork: For a good teacher, it is a must to be a good team player also. He or she should work in collaboration and coordination with seniors and juniors.
Respect: If you give respect, you earn it as well. So, it’s important that you pay respect to your students. This is a sign of a supremely good teacher.
Professional Skills of Good Teachers
A good teacher, instructor or professor needs to possess excellent professional skills also in addition to a set of soft skills. While sound academic qualification is important, you as a teacher need to master some classroom etiquettes as well. These are:
Planning & Provision: An excellent teacher knows well to plan his or lessons for next day in advance. He or she needs to gather learning materials beforehand so that the class does not have to wait.
Paper Correction: Often teachers take long time to assess student’s performance in exam, which in turn creates nervous feeling or cause loss of interest in them. So, if you don’t want this situation to occur, make sure to correct papers on time.
Interactivity: While you are in the classroom, do interact with students. Don’t let your classroom slip into a monologue. It will create boredom and subsequently, defeat the very purpose of teaching.