Would I Make A Good Teacher? Teaching Quiz

Embark on a thought-provoking journey with our Teaching quiz, 'Would I Make a Good Teacher?' Discover if you've got the enthusiasm, patience, and charisma to excel in the classroom.

The Top 14 Qualities that Make a Good Teacher

You don’t need to have a specific personality type to be an inspiring and effective teacher. However, there are some useful traits you should work on developing or strengthening if your goal is to be a more engaging and successful educator.

1. Adaptability

Adaptability is a must for teachers, who need to continuously evaluate what’s working for their students — and even more importantly, what isn’t working.

2. Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand what another person is feeling or experiencing. As a teacher, it’s vital to practice empathy instead of making assumptions.

3. Patience

Having a reserve of patience will make it easier for you to work through each student’s unique struggles and challenges, which may be difficult or slow-going to overcome.

4. Engagement

If you want to generate engagement and enthusiasm in your class, it’s imperative to exemplify those traits yourself, showing your students an infectious passion for learning!

5. Active Listening

Seek feedback, encourage honesty, provide ways for students to contact you easily, and be attentive whenever you listen, always trying to read between the lines and assess body language while you’re communicating.

6. Lifelong Learning

The best educators aren’t just interested in teaching — they also have a passion for lifelong learning, which is reflected in their enthusiasm and engagement as instructors.

7. Free of Bias

As an educator, you’ll be responsible for teaching an extraordinarily wide range of students. To combat inequality and discrimination and ensure fairness, you need to assess your students’ needs in a way that is free from bias — something that requires you to continuously check in with your own judgments and assumptions about others.

8. Respectful Attitude

It’s imperative for educators to be mindful of this imbalance and ensure that students feel respected and heard for the people they are and what they contribute to the classroom.

9. Creativity

Whether you teach first graders or doctoral students, you’ll need the ability to innovate, think outside the box, and find novel solutions to challenges, which will empower you to meet a wider range of students’ needs.

10. Collaborative

From parent-teacher conferences and department meetings to teaching dozens or hundreds of students every day, education is an intensely collaborative field by nature, involving a constant interplay between students, teachers, administrators, and family members.

11. Preparation

You can increase your overall level of preparedness as an educator by learning about your students’ strengths and challenges, and ensuring that you consider how each of your students could be affected by your lesson plans.

12. Promote a Growth Mindset

According to psychologist Carol Dweck, individuals with a fixed mindset perceive assets like intelligence as being determined early in life, which can cause obstacles or challenges to seem insurmountable or overwhelming. In contrast to a fixed mindset, individuals who have a growth mindset believe that traits like intelligence and creativity can be developed with practice.

13. Meet Students Where They Are

Your students will come to you from different backgrounds, skill sets, and challenges — and you need to be ready to meet them, whichever point they’ve reached in their learning.

14. Cross-Discipline Teaching

Drawing on multiple subjects and disciplines shows students how businesses operate — and how problem-solving works — in the real world, grounding their learning in practical real-life scenarios.

If you don’t possess all of these traits already, don’t panic — just be mindful that there may be some areas where you could benefit from a little practice.

It's time to step into the shoes of an educator and see if you have what it takes to inspire and educate the next generation with our teacher personality quiz.