What skills are required to teach?

The first teacher, for most of us, in our lives, is MOTHER. She takes immense care, shows enough patience and compassion and encourages us to learn the basic art of living on this earth. Do we have something to learn here?

In case you are planning to grow up to be a teacher (just in case!! Not a favoured option), there as some skills that you need to start picking up. Of course, this has to be supported by some attitude and aptitude.

So what are these skills? Some of the easily identifiable skills include that of communication, organizing, inter-personal and critical thinking, among many others. Let us see a few examples of these skills and see how can one develop the same.

While adding muscle to your communication skills, the key is to listen enough and practice speaking in front of audience about things that you are most familiar with. Communication, as often said, is directly proportional to the confidence that you have on a topic. I am sure you may have noticed, among family or friends, that even an "introvert" has a lot to share when s/he is comfortable with the topic. Slowly, this provides the necessary encouragement and motivation to "keep walking".....

Organizing is one of the toughest skills for most teachers who seem to be "lost" all the while. However, at the same time, I have amazed at few of my teachers who are meticulous to the tee in being organized for delivering the class. This is a skill that needs to inculcated early in life; becomes more and more difficult to learn as you age.This creates a huge impact on the young minds that you teach in the class.

A pleasing inter-personal skill is always supportive in creating a "conducive" learning environment. Again, the key here is self-confidence and motivation. For teachers who view it as a "job", usually display poor inter-personal skills and create a "repulsive" learning environment.

Finally critical thinking enables a teacher to present a topic or a concept in a contextual, simple and innovative manner that attracts the imagination of the young learner. This is a "critical" skill required to be developed by the potential teacher as one progresses through their own learning cycle.

I will be happy to hear from your views on this.