What makes a great teacher?

It has been proven that teaching is more than just knowledge enrichment, it's also about having an enthusiastic and caring attitude towards the students and, overall, a love for the job itself.

According to Jeremy Harmer's "How to Teach English", there are several conditions one must have in order to be considered a good teacher.

“A teacher must love their job. If they really enjoy their job, that’ll make the lessons more interesting”.
As reported by Harmer, teachers who look like they don't want to be standing in front of a class tend to have a negative effect on their students. You are allowed to have a bad day, even a whole month or a year, but the key is to always put on a ‘good teacher’s face’, despite feeling terrible outside the classroom.

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“I like the teacher who has their own personality and doesn’t hide it from the students so that they are not only a teacher but a person as well”.
Students must be able to create an academic bond with their teachers, especially in language learning classrooms, since their confidence and motivation is going to be pushed to the limit regularly. Teachers who bring their personality into their lessons tend to have better results than those who don’t.

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“A good teacher is someone who helps, rather than shouts”.
Most of the time, the ones who behave poorly inside a classroom are the students who feel like they are wasting time, mostly because they feel like they cannot do this. Being able to control these students and redirect their interest towards new ways of learning, instead of just shouting them for not wanting to study, is one of the fundamental skills of teaching.

One of the greatest enemies of language teaching is students' boredom, especially if most of them don’t want to be there in the first place.

John Fanselow, in his book “Breaking Rules” correctly suggest that for both teacher’s sanity and students’ development, the teachers need to break their own rules of teaching. Keeping your students interested and motivated through the year can be a rather challenging thing to accomplish, and a predictable lesson every week is not the way to do so.

Teachers have to motivate their students through both encouragement and enthusiasm, giving importance to learning a foreign language, creating a calm, pleasant and secure atmosphere with humor, laughter, and all in all, a positive environment.

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Language learning boosts our confidence and makes us feel better about ourselves

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Setting goals and encouraging a more independent and creative working atmosphere with imaginative ideas, questions, and contributions; is another way to motivate your learners. Letting them know their opinions matter.

These are all good examples of a teacher's commitment and natural behavior shown through their lessons but a question like "what makes a good teacher?" has such a broad answer it is impossible to pick one only.

To me, a great teacher cares more about their students’ learning and emotional state of mind, rather than worrying about their own teaching duties and responsibilities. They do not think about making things easier for themselves; instead, their ultimate priority is to create a classroom environment​ comfortable enough so the students can develop their skills successfully.

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Source: Jeremy Harmer's "How To Teach English
Image Source: I, II, III