Teaching is more than just passing knowledge on to the listeners. It’s about making sure the knowledge has been passed in an easily comprehensible way, has been accepted at the students’ end, and will be retained by them for the rest of their lives. This is exactly what a good teacher does. Think about your favorite teacher. Was he or she funny? Offered you college homework help when it was hard to do it right? Told you the best info on a subject? Helped you with personal advice?
Not everybody can be a good teacher. One needs to have a passion to deliver the best in them to be a good teacher. Along with passion, here are the other essential qualities a great teacher must possess.
1. Communicate Clear Objectives
If your students don’t know the objectives of your course right from your very first lecture, you cannot claim to be a good teacher. Making the course objectives clear is important because it gives direction to the students. They can know in advance what they’ll be expecting from their next lesson.
It also helps the students to evaluate where they stand at the end of each lesson. All they have to do is to compare their learning with the stated objectives.
2. Passion For Teaching
As mentioned before, passion is the sole criterion for whether a person is a great teacher or not. Only the passionate teachers go the extra mile to make sure they have delivered their best, and that their students have learned the most they could. A person passionate about teaching would never show up late to his class. They would never delay checking their students’ assignments and would prepare every lecture well in advance to keep things interesting for the students.
3. Getting Students To Participate
Student participation is the single most important thing that can demonstrate how great a teacher is. Irrespective of the level or age of students they are teaching, good teachers always make sure to have an interactive session.
It not only improves the relationship of the students with their teachers but also encourages them to ask any query they have – which they’d probably not ask otherwise. A class where only the teacher speaks soon gets boring for the students, who might then get distracted from the lecture. But in a class where everyone participates and the students contribute to the best of their knowledge, things couldn’t get interesting enough. There is no need to take away the smartphones of your students if you can keep your class engaging and interactive at all times.
4. Prepare Lectures In Advance
No matter how expert you’re at your subject, you cannot give a great lecture unless you prepare it well in advance. There’s no end to knowledge and with the rapidly changing world around us, you can never be sure if your knowledge is up-to-date. That’s why it’s much better to spare a few minutes to prepare your next lecture than to get embarrassed in front of your students.
Preparing a lecture in advance doesn’t just keep you a step ahead of students but it also helps you to organize your lecture in a way that is more comprehensible for the students.
5. Managing The Class
No matter how well-behaved your students are, they can act unruly at times. It’s quite normal for young blood to get distracted even by the most insignificant things. What’s important is how you behave in response to that unruliness.
A good teacher doesn’t punish their students. They rather try to develop a caring relationship with their students. Sharing a joke or asking about what they’re watching on TV nowadays can provide students with the distraction they’re looking for. A great teacher also strictly adheres to the starting/ ending time of the lecture to keep things as organized as possible.
Conclusion
Teaching students can be hard, but not when you adopt the qualities mentioned above.