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[Chris Westergaard]

What Makes a Good Teacher?
What makes a good teacher? It's a question that gets asked lot by students of The Language House TEFL/TESOL and university students that I connect with who are interested in teaching abroad. While the question is vague and definitely a bit subjective, it's not that hard to answer. Here's a list of what I think is important from my own experience in the field and watching literally thousands of lessons from other teachers. These aren't in any particular order but I have added an asterisk on some that I think are really important.

1. Creativity*
Creative people will obviously have an easier time being creative in the classroom. Such a needed skill for making your lessons interesting and finding new and dynamic ways of presenting material. The props you use, the interactions you create, the role-plays you design will greatly help you in the classroom. Note - a lot of more analytical minded teachers will make excuses regarding their creativeness and say that they 'are simply not like that.' BS I say. Everyone can be creative if they put the energy into. You just have to make it part of your lessons and it will eventually become part of your personality.

2. Organization
Being prepared, having assignments done, having materials ready... all of these things will make your students believe that they are in the presence of a professional. If you are a naturally disorganized person as I am, too bad. It's part of the job and part of being good. Take the extra time before the lesson to set your activities up. Do a double/triple check to make sure you have everything you need.

3. Punctuality
Being on time and ending on time. As with being organized it gives an air of professionalism.

4. People skills
You can't be a good teacher without having a love for other people and need to see them succeed. If you can't communicate well with people or if you are shy about interacting with strangers, you are really going to have to work on it. YOU have to be the instigator of communication in the classroom. YOU are the one that sets the tone and feel of your classroom/lessons.


5. Passion/compassion
A love for teaching, the subject matter and the time with your students/class is a must. You will be tired, you will be unmotivated during many, many lessons. Too bad, get over it. Your job is to motivate and inspire. If you are not feeling it that day, fake it. Nothing is worse than seeing a tired teacher that clearly doesn't want to be in the classroom.
I used to have a crazy schedule in Prague, training TEFL, doing ESL, managing a TEFL course, doing emails and promotional work. It was nuts and I was exhausted most days out of the week. It didn't matter though. When you step into the classroom, you should always be ready to bring it and give it 100 percent if you can.

6 Goal-oriented behavior*
So, so important for language teachers to adopt a model of goals. Without goals, what are you doing? You should have goals for your class/lesson as well as for the semester. Why are these goals important? How can I test them? What things can I do to help them achieve them? What parts of the lesson/curriculum are not helping and can be stripped out? All of this stuff is important. If you don't have goals/objective and ways to test them, then all you're really doing is having your students talk without any purpose.

7. Empathy*
Without a doubt the most important thing you need as a teacher. Hands down. Don't think of empathy as you caring for your students, it's not about that. It's about knowing what they need, what motivates them, what they can and can't handle, when to push harder and when to back off.
Again, some people have a natural sense for others and some are in the dark. Don't let that hinder you. Scan your class, how do they feel? Are they enjoying the lesson? How can you tell? What do these individual students need language wise? Language, motivation, grammar, lessons, interactions...etc vary greatly depending on whether you are teaching teenagers, middle aged businessmen, elderly ladies. The list goes on and on. How do you approach these individual groups? How do you make the language relevant for them? How should you dress? This all deals with empathy. Knowing your students and knowing what makes them tick. If you have that sensitivity, you can design and crate

8. Knowledge
You have to know what you're doing. You have to know grammar and language and all of those crazy questions that students will ask. If you don't, you'll be caught off guard and will literally blackout for a second or two. When you start teaching you are going to be thinking about so many different things. Your mind has to approach language from a totally different way and it is very easy to forget even the most basic of things. It's kind of like being self aware as your driving. If you really start thinking about how to drive, you'll notice that you start making mistakes. Language teaching is the same way. We are not used to analytically looking at our own language and why/how it works. When we do, we blank. Learn as much as you can, practice as much as you can and you'll be able to face head on, confidently, any question that a student asks you.

9. Energy
Big energy always wins out over passiveness in the classroom. It's actually hard for a lot of teachers of other subjects to grasp that. You need to use your body and move around the classroom. This doesn't mean that you are screaming and dancing all class, but when it comes time to turn up the energy, you need to be able to hit that switch. If you can't, your students are going to be bored.
When teaching group classes you should be standing up, monitoring crouched and able to hover to group to group. Think of yourself as being a bee or hummingbird darting in and out of student group interactions
* Note- the energy you display will be a direct result of your group/interaction .Some classes are going to need high end energy, others not as much. Use your best judgement.

10. Adaptability/flexibility and the ability to improve
Be flexible with your structure and organization and let your instincts/empathy of the class guide you. If things are working, stick with them. If not, change it up. Be quick and fast and be able to mold and change freely. Everything should be smooth and you should have an arsenal of different techniques and approaches in case things don't work out.
Also look at the ability to teach as being a constant process. Work on getting better at your skills in the classroom. Look to others for different approaches and never assume that improvement is an impossibility. There are so many highly educated teachers with MAs and PHDs that are stagnate in their abilities. Don't settle for that. Never let your ego get in the way of progress. There's always more to learn and getting to the level of true mastery is as rewarding as the process it takes to do so.

Ending comments
Some new teachers are going to be naturals and you yourself might not be. It's going to piss you off quite a bit seeing someone excel fast while you don't. Do not get discouraged in the beginning and certainly don't quit. Teaching is about skills and learning skills. It can take time and energy and a lot of mistakes and horrible lessons until you get it down. The trick is to work at it, practice being better, learn as much as you can and you'll get there.

Cheers,
Chris Westergaard

[Glenski]

All good points. Just 2 remarks I would like to add.

Knowledge and adaptability and goals are nothing if the teacher cannot explain clearly what is being taught (or when answering a student's question). You also don't have to know everything. It's pretty much impossible, anyway, so knowing where to find the answers quickly (by the next class) is just as good as long as one follows through.

Regarding creativity:

[Chris Westergaard]

Probably 'effort' is the better word.

The point is more on how the idea itself of creativity is approached.

For example I'm a horribly disorganized person, but I know that I have to pull it together for classes and keep things in order.

Organized people who are not creative do not often feel that they should be creative. It's more of a 'well that's not me, so I'm not going to try' kind of approach. Energy and effort means that if you focus on making that part of your lesson, the ideas will eventually start flowing. It's just that a lot of teachers never even try.

Fair enough, I think the best way to approach developing better qualities is by admitting that they are important. Most teachers don't end up doing so. I could go into tons of different tricks on how to get better and will eventually.

In terms of voice, there's a few things you can do. I usually had my monotone TEFL students practice reading stories out load and work on annunciation, pitch, tone, voice control ...etc

[AGoodStory]

[sounion]

[Glenski]

[eurobound]

[spiral78]

I'm not sure to what degree truly original thinking can be applied to second language learning. We aren't inventing i-phones or anything. 'Original' can refer to brand - new curriculum, but as a designer of curriculum, I can say that most every aspect of this builds on and originates from earlier/other work. As it should - language learning is, of course, a developmental process, rather than a series of distinct 'teaching/learning' episodes. Recognised patterns support the process. Sure, we may occasionally come up with a brand new task or activity, or try a new way to present something, or a new approach to a problem - or at least 'new' in the sense that we don't know of anyone who's done it that way!! But those are just elements of the whole.

I think it's entirely creative to tweak, redesign, or even just present in a different way, published materials, or materials developed by other teachers. In fact, this is necessary to good teaching, IMO. No book, by definition, has been written for 'my' students exactly!

[real2104]

what a great read. I totally agree with all of these points.

But I too am a very analytical person who lacks creativity - but I found I could still be an effective teacher by taking the time to research/develop my lesson plans. Really, I must have spent more time outside of the classroom preparing for class than actually teaching.

I envy those who are naturally creative

[Sashadroogie]

"research/develop my lesson plans"

How does this differ from creativity? I think some posters here are being too hard on themselves. As Spiral and Agoodstory say, even just tweaking is creativity too. I'd add that a clever classroom execution of standard materials is just as artful as coming up with new materials.

Finding ways of adapting materials and finding solutions to make materials accessible to learners is a naturally creative act too. For example, a reading text you have selected for reading skills practice contains lexis which you know will be challenging for learners, but you need to find some way of easing them past this without them losing themselves in a dictionary or excessive TTT, whereby the aim of reading skills would be missed. So, a creative solution would be to design a reading task, a scaffolding exercise perhaps, that would deal with problem vocab as a reading task. E.g. handing out a prepared set of glossed phrases of problem lexis that the learners then have to scan the reading text to find the original phrases. By scanning (a reading skill) the learners then teach themselves the vocabulary. A creative solution to a mundane problem.

Won't ever win any awards in an creative arts competition, but that's not really what we do anyway...

[M.Andrew]

Very nice article! Thanks so much.

I really appreciate it, since it fits with what I've seen over the past 15 years or so of ESL. Fun teachers with passion, creativity, and adaptability are always the best and most effective, even when their knowledge is limited. People tend to put too much focus on academic qualifications.

I would add something helpful (I hope!) related to point #7 - Empathy:

Learn a second language yourself if you haven't done so. It is much easier to know the difficulties and frustrations second language learners face if you've been there yourself.

If you are living abroad, teaching in a foreign country, then its a no-brainer - Learn the local language. Not as a hobby on the side, I mean as a serious student. Ask to sit in if your workplace offers language lessons in the local language. This yields great benefits, like: understanding your students' first language interference, and picking up on similarities between the grammar and general usage of the two languages and their clear differences.

I honestly feel empowered by tremendous insight because of my years of learning the local language. Its priceless and you can't pick it up as a theory from a book or a website.

[nomad soul]

To expand on empathy, the teacher needs to be culturally aware/sensitive to the students' culture(s) when teaching. In other words, a good teacher is congnizant of cultural boundaries and adapts his/her teaching style and the lesson content accordingly. Additionally, the teacher relates the content to the students' culture(s) and experiences (context) that personalizes their learning experience.

[jpvanderwerf2001]

I would add "Developed Sense of Humor" to that list. Effective teachers who can hold students' attention very often have a good sense of humor which they implement into lessons.