Your personality as teacher: can your students trust you?

At all levels of education, students actively rate and evaluate their teachers. These ratings relate not to your personality, but more to how your students feel they are being treated. Your students need to define you as an acceptable, warm, and competent human being, even though they may be relatively uninterested in you as a person. Whether or not you are an introvert or extravert, an optimist or pessimist, nervous or easy-going, is irrelevant to your capability as a teacher, or even your students’ attitude towards you. To become a fine teacher, you do not have to have a particular type of personality. Over the past 90 years, with studies stemming back into the 1920s, attempts to describe the ideal teacher in terms of personality traits have proved unfruitful. If there is any secret to becoming a fine teacher, it does not lie in the type of personality you have brought to the profession, as least as defined by traditional measures of personality.