When looking at professionalism I feel like compassion is an important characteristic for teachers to have. Compassion is helping someone that is struggling or suffering. This is important for a teacher as they need to constantly be helping children who may be suffering. Teachers may also need to be compassionate towards parents or guardians if anything is going on out with the school environment.
Patience is another hugely important quality that teachers need. When working with children, patience is something that you need as children may not pick up ides and concept that you are teaching as quick as adults would. Children can get something wrong several times over, make a mess when doing art projects or playing. Teachers need patience to just keep calm in these situations and not get angry with the children but teach them what they need to do.
Another quality that I find important in teaching is fairness. Children come from all different backgrounds and have different skill levels. A teacher needs to be a fair person and treat all children the same. A good teacher cannot treat children differently because of where they come from or how clever they are. A lot of the time teachers can be seen as not being fair but this isn’t the case. All children learn differently so sometimes you have to teach children differently to combat this but at the same time you are still teaching children fairly. Fairness when disciplining children is also important as teachers cannot be seen as favoring one child over another.
In my opinion, tolerance is another important characteristic that teachers need. Teachers need to be able to tolerate a lot from all angles. Teachers may need to tolerate abuse from parents or guardians on the way they are teaching or how they may think you are doing something wrong. A teacher needs to be professional in these situations and tolerate what the parent say. It does not mean the teacher needs to do what the parent is telling them but they need to be able to tolerate the criticism but be confident in your teaching style.
Lastly, honesty is an important quality for teachers to have. An honest teacher is a great teacher. Children do not benefit from a teacher that lies about what they are good at. A teacher needs to be honest about what their pupils are good and bad at. If a teacher was not honest then children would not know what they need to work on and what they are good at. On the other hand, teachers also need to be careful with honesty and make sure that they are not brutally honest and that they do not offend anyone.
