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I believe that there are four main pillars that contribute to the making of a good English teacher. A teacher will not be successful in the classroom without a strong base in the following four personal qualities: patience, flexibility, energy and confidence, and resilience and capacity for continuous growth. Patience is the most obvious of the four pillars and perhaps the most important. A teacher must not lose their patience when it comes to the speed at which their students are learning and when dealing with disruptive students. There will always be students that start their English learning journey without any prior knowledge or practice and care must be taken that they do not fall behind. In addition, patience is required when understanding that your students come from different backgrounds, with different levels of general education, and different attention spans. A good teacher must know that all of these things will factor into the success of each student and it is your job to acclimate to the way your students learn The second pillar is an innate energy and confidence that will keep their students engaged and excited for activities and lessons. Boring and uninterested teachers are common in the US education system, but it is unacceptable to bring to a classroom where English is your student’s second language. If you cannot keep your energy levels high and be just as engaged, if not more, than your students you are failing them as a teacher. Combining a monotone voice and a foriegn language is a recipe for disaster for any language learning student and they will quickly find themselves frustrated through no fault of their own. A good teacher is also flexible. They must have intuition to know when their lessons are not as effective as they thought it would be when writing up the lesson plan. A teacher must have alternate activities and ways of teaching the same topic so that they can switch it up on the fly if they realize the students are not responding to the lesson as expected or are confused by the information and the way the teacher is attempting to engage with them. A good teacher must know that this is a growing pain and revisions are a necessary part of being a successful teacher. As well, teachers must be flexible when it comes to using tools like OHPs, course books, white boards, video cameras etc. There may be technical difficulties when utilizing these tools, and a teacher needs to know when to move on and use a different method if one of their teaching tools is having difficulty functioning. Flexibility is closely tied with the last pillar of a great English teacher. The last pillar and perhaps the most important is resilience and a capacity for growth. First time teachers go through it all and have to learn from their mistakes in order to continue to provide the best education for their students as possible. If this is not the ultimate goal of the teacher, they are in the wrong profession. Resilience is important when dealing with disruptive students as well as lesson plans that didn’t go as great as planned.
