OUTSTANDING TEACHER ATTRIBUTES

Below are 11 attributes that I believe define or describe an outstanding teacher. However, these are based on my philosophy as a holistic educator. There is not a universal set of attributes that are right for every teacher and teaching situation. Each of us must ultimately identify and define our own set of attributes based on our own philosophies and styles of teaching. 

1. You care about your students. This is the most professional of all behaviors or attributes. You want the very best for your students. You truly want them to reach their full potential as students and as humans.

2. You relate to and with your students. Teaching starts with a relationship. Until then, you are just a dancing monkey standing up in front of your students performing tricks. 

3. You demonstrate unconditional positive regard for your students, your colleagues, and yourself.  To teach fully you must accept your students unconditionally. You may not always accept their behaviors, but you let them know that you accept them, as human beings, just the way that they are. Your acceptance of them is not performance-based. Unconditional positive regard means that you accept people (yourself, students, other teachers, and friends) as they are – not as you would like them to be. 

 4. You prepare and are prepared. If you care about your students, if you care about their learning and their impact on the world, you are prepared to teach each day. They are worthy of your time, effort, energy, creativity, and intellect. The planning and preparation of your daily lessons, curriculum, and general classroom rules and procedures is a way of honoring your students and the teaching profession. 

  5. You engage in personal and professional reflection. There are three levels of reflection:

    Level I. After every teaching episode you reflect to identify those things that worked well and those things that could be don differently. 

    Level 2. You reflect to see if what you are doing aligns with what you know about teaching and learning. Does it reflect best practice? Can you find research or research-based theory to support what you are doing? Or is what you are doing based on ‘I-think-isms’. 

    Level 3. You reflect to see if what you are doing is in harmony with your values and your philosophy. Hence the important of identifying said things. 

6. You are willing to change and to grow. You do not see your current state as a teacher or human being as an end state. You see teaching and being human both as dynamic states. To change and to grow is to be alive. To stay the same is to die. You realize that learning is never complete. You engaged in some sort of professional development.

7. You invest in humans. An investment in yourself is the wisest sort of investment. You spend time in personal growth activities like daily reflection, personal reading, meditation, spiritual activities, activities or endeavors that focus on the development of interpersonal or intrapersonal intelligence, the arts, or social activities. You invest in yourself as well in terms of diet, sleep, exercise, and recreation.  What is good for the teacher is good for the student. You see your students and other humans as worth investing your time and energy as well. Thus, in your teaching you do not simply attend to students frontal lobes. You try to attend to the whole child: their intelligence, emotions, creativity, imagination, rationality, spirituality, intuition, and their social selves. You create activities, lessons, and experiences that might lead to their total growth as human beings.

8. You are fully present in your teaching and being. You allow your whole self to be present in your teaching. Your whole self is a tool that can help you perceive and understand your students and your self. It also enables you to create better, more multi-dimensional learning experiences. You are fully present in the moment. You are focused and thinking about your teaching and your students. You allow yourself to use humor, emotions, intuition, intuition, creativity, imagination, as well as logic and knowledge in your teaching and decision making.  When you are fully present in your teaching, teaching is fully present in your being. That is, you carry your students with you. You think about them when you are not teaching. Teaching and being become intertwined.

9. You allow students to see you. You are not simply your topic or your role. You are a human and you present this human to your class. How much of you should be seen is always something that should be decided by you, your students, and your particular teaching situation. 

10. You seek to understand. There are always reasons why humans act the way they do. No behavior can be truly understood with out understand in which the behavior is displayed. Sometimes negative behavior is a healthy response to an unhealthy situation. 

11. You stand up for what you believe. When you see something detrimental to students or their learning, you are willing to stand up and speak out. Standing up for what you believe and speaking out is not always easy. Some people may not like you. There will be some uncomfortable moments – but the rights of a professional educator comes with responsibilities. You are responsible for educating the public – for speaking truth to power – for identifying effective and effective practices. In this way, you will be agents of change.

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