SED 406 Education Essay

Education Essay: What are the four qualities a teacher needs and why?

            When thinking about this question, there are tons of different adjectives that come to mind. However, to pick the most important, I would say a teacher needs to be patient, open-minded, flexible, and creative.

            Patience is a quality I think teachers need because a million things can happen in a school day and one small thing can set off or change your lesson. Maybe a couple students are giving you a hard time and they aren’t paying attention. Or perhaps a student just doesn’t get it. A teacher being patient, going slow, and explaining things more than just once can be everything to a student. If a student sees their teaching taking the time to explain things through and is patient with them, that student might think differently of their teacher. Whereas if a teacher loses their patience and gets frustrated easily, the student might not ask questions and could think that teacher doesn’t care.

            I think it is important for a teacher to be open-minded. A teacher should be open to different opinions and criticism from other teachers. As a teacher, a lesson plan might not run smoothly and your colleagues might tell you a better way of doing it. Teachers also need to be open-minded when it comes to the student. As humans our initial thought is to judge a person, but when a teacher is stuck with 20-30 students for an entire school year, you don’t want to think poorly of a student and let it dampen the relationship with that student. A teacher should be open to new ideas, new relationships, and have an open mind in their teaching strategies.

            The last two qualities I think a teacher should have go hand in hand with one another. A teacher should be flexible and creative. As a teacher tons of things could change in a day where it could alter the day’s schedule. Sometimes secondary schools operate on a rotation and sometimes odd and even days. If one of the rotation days were to shift your classes around you need to be prepared to maybe do something differently or even shorten a lesson if you have less time. This brings up the creative quality. When students get to high school, they are tired of school and I think it’s important that teachers are creative in their lesson plans. If a teacher were to do the same routine; lecture, take notes, read, quiz, read, test, repeat, the students would be bored and lose their minds. Teachers need to be creative and do activities with the kids, even games at the end of a chapter to get ready for a quiz.