1.3 Contributors of the Effective Teacher

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  1.3.1 Psychological Characteristics

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  Examples of the Teachers' Psychological Characteristics

Personality

Permissevenes or Dogmatism. Achievement Motivation Introversion or Extroversion Abstractness or Concreteness Directness or Indirectness

Attitude

Attitude toward Children. Attitude toward Teaching Attitude toward Authority Attitude toward Being a Teacher Attitude toward Subject Taught

Experience

Experience in Teaching, Subject Taught and in Grade Level Taught. How You Prefer to Be Taught. How You Prefer to Teach. How You Were Taught.

Aptitude/Achievement

National Teacher Exam. Special Ability Test (Reasoning ability, verbal fluency etc.)

  Personality

Although certain interpersonal, emotional, and coping behaviors are believed to be required for effective teaching, researchers have provided few insights from the personality test into the positive social behavior, such as honesty, hardworkingness, generousity, friendness, discipline, insightness, wisdom that may be needed for effective teaching.

Although the results of studies on gender are inconclusive, studies refine some classroom behaviors of the male and female teachers. For example,

Male	Female
more dominant and authoritarian. Relatedly, their classrooms are more organized, task-oriented and teacher-controlled. less “tender-minded”.	maintain “warmer and nurturing” classrooms and they seemed to be more tolerant of misbehavior. students are more likely to initiate a question or statement, give more incorrect answers and take risks by guessing answers. use praise more frequently and are more likely to provide correct answer when students can’t or don’t.

  Attitude

While attitude assessments may be either global (e.g., attitude toward the educational system and the teaching profession) or specific (e.g., attitude toward a particular task, child, or curriculum), most attempts to measure teacher attitude generally have failed to forecast what a teacher does in the classroom. Research generally has shown a low and nonsignificant correspondence between teacher attitude and classroom performance.

Therefore, the use of attitude data for measuring teacher effectiveness has had to rest on the assumption that attitudes are related to behaviors that are one or more steps removed from the actual teaching process, such as more organized lesson plans or better subject preparation.     

  Experience

Biographical data about yourself is taken into account such as your qualifications (graduate credits earned, or hours of training), years of experience in teaching, and years of experience with a specific grade level, curriculum and types of learner.

Another set of factors influencing how you will teach are your schooling experiences. Those experiences include preferred ways of learning, the kind and amount of teaching preparation you were receiving, the way you were taught.

How you prefer to be taught is related to the constructed attitude towards teacher. There is no doubt that each one has some favorite teachers. You like them for various reasons. For one thing, the way they instructed you probably made it easier for you to learn. Accidentally or purposely, they taught you in the way you preferred.

Example
If you like to read, you may have assigned a lot of reading.
If you are socially oriented and learn best by interacting with others, you may have given lots of group work.
In other words, your “best” teachers probably taught to your preferred learning style.

How you prefer to teach are probably influenced by how you enjoy being taught. For example, those of you who learn best from direct or expository teaching may consciously or unconsciously conclude that your students share your preference.
To discover your beliefs about education and teaching, consider the following questions:

What do you believe about students?
What do you believe about the function of knowledge?
What is the role of a teacher in the classroom? and consequently,
Which way of teaching seems to be most compatible with your present views?

How you were taught. If it is true that “we teach as were taught,” then your teaching will model the teaching of your preferred mentors.

Aptitude and Achievement

Teachers' prior achievement and aptitude is important, but not sufficient for creating effective learning environment. Standards set by training institutions require teachers to meet minimum levels of competence for certification. This is usually sufficient to make the variations in grades among beginning teachers irrelevant to actual performance in the classroom.Teachers' actual performance in preparing lesson, task orientation, motivating the students to the lecture content depends on a lot of factors. These might be psychological characteristics, level of subject matter knowledge and teaching strategies.