Everything You Need to Know to Be a Great Teacher

There are only three things needful for becoming a great teacher:

1. Know your subject.
   • If you’re a Language Arts teacher, then write professionally and read voraciously. If you’re science teacher, then conduct experiments and publish your results. If you’re a music teacher then book gigs and sing or play to real audiences.
   • Students deserve to learn from the best, so you must be constantly striving to become the best. Put the lie to the hideous saying, “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach.”
   • If you’re not good enough to make a living at the subject you teach, then how can you teach it well enough for students to fall in love with it?
2. Know your students.
   • Talk with them, listen to them, laugh with them. What music do they listen to? What TV shows do they watch? How many brothers and sisters do they have? What are their dreams for the future? What are they afraid of?
   • How do they learn? What do they want to know?  What can they already do well?  What do they need most from you?
   • What would they die for?
3. Know your yourself.
   • Write in a journal, meditate, go to confession.
   • Each night before you go to bed ask yourself if you’re a better person today than you were yesterday.
   • When you wake up in the morning ask yourself what you want from the day, and plan how you’re going to get it.
   • Play to your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses.
   • Uncover your dreams and your deepest desires.

If you know those three things, the rest will take care of itself.  Once you know your subject, your students and yourself, teaching becomes easy.  It’s simply the process of getting the students to fall in love with the subject as much as you do.

Here is the fool-proof question to ask to determine whether or not you’re succeeding as a teacher:

• Do my students love reading/writing/science/math/music/history more today than they did yesterday?

If the answer is no, then it’s either because you don’t know your subject enough, you don’t know your students enough, or you don’t know yourself enough.

Teaching methods, classroom management skills, lesson planning–these are trivialities compared to becoming an expert in your subject, your students and yourself.

And if you want to be more than great– if you want to become legendary–then here is what you must do:

• Love your subject.
• Love your students.
• Love yourself.