When it comes to what profession you are going to choose in your career, you will be hard pressed to find anything more rewarding than teaching. Teaching gives you the opportunity to impart your knowledge on others, the chance to build and shape the futures of hundreds of students and the ability to inspire those that you teach to do brilliant things in their lives. The ability to teach is something that few of us are born with and it will take years for you to learn how to best teach people.
There are some core skills that you will need if you wish to be a teacher, skills that many in education such as the successful writer and educationist Douglas Reeves say should be possessed by anybody wishing to succeed as a teacher. If this is something that you would like to do then here are the skills that you will need to be a great teacher.
Leadership
Within the classroom, you are the leader, you are the one who dictates what will happen and you are the one who will lead the class down their educational path. The position alone gives you the air of leadership and it is important that you back this up with discipline, the ability to be respected and to give respect as well as consistency in your teaching ability no matter which student you are working with.
Engaging
To succeed as a teacher, you must have an engaging style, if not then you are unlikely to garner the attention of your class and give them reason to pay attention. An engaging style should be a creative and exciting style of teaching, a method of teaching that the students can relate to and stay interested. If you speak in a monotone voice, don’t ask the class questions regularly and teach only from books or the whiteboard then you are unlikely to gain the attention of your class.
High Standards
It’s important as a teacher that you have high standards, reachable, but high, you will not help your students improve if you judge them by low standards. You must strike a healthy balance here, if your standards are unreachable then your students will become downhearted, too reachable and they won’t seek to improve. Lay your standards out early so that your students know exactly how high they should be aiming.
Knowledge
It my sound simple but it is important that you are extremely knowledgeable in your field, your students will ask regular questions and expect that you know the answers, failure here could lose the respect of your classroom so ensure that you are constantly striving to learn more about what you are teaching.
Passion
If you are just teaching as a way to pay the bills then you are not going to make a great teacher, a great teacher must display passion. You reason should not only be for the subject that you teach, you should also be inspired by teaching others and have a passion for watching others succeed, if you lack passion for what you do then you will ultimately be failing your students.