The most important factor affecting the quality of education is the quality of the individual teacher in the classroom. There is clear evidence that a teacher’s ability and effectiveness are the most influential determinants of student’s achievement. The knowledgeable teacher is one who knows what to teach and has some idea about how to do it. She knows that once a learner learns a basic fact, this can be incorporated into a future lesson for teaching some subsequent fact. According to research, effective teachers not only make students feel good about school and learning, but also that their work actually results in increased student achievement.
The achievement of quality education requires the collective effort of various stakeholders. Effort needs to be made by students, school principals and the government in order to realize desirable quality standards in secondary education. Empirically speaking, effective teachers also have a direct influence in enhancing student learning. Teachers are able to affect virtually every aspect of their students’ lives, teaching them the important life lessons that will help them succeed beyond papers, projects and standardized tests.
Unfortunately, it could be judged that the quantitative aspects of education have become the main focus of attention in recent years for policy makers (Education for All, 2005). Even if teachers work often under pressure for other reasons; still they have to work under rigid requirements and have high expectations from parents and society to produce high quality workforce. They take such a very important role in the education but when students’ test scores are low, teachers are the first and only ones to be called bad teachers. Bruce, Hersh, and Mckibbin (1983) stated that even how experienced the teachers, without high quality of effort, other factors alone make little difference.
Let me end by this quotation of Maya Angelou, “This is the value of the teacher, who looks at a face and says there’s something behind that and I want to reach the person, I want to influence that person, I want to encourage that person, I want to enrich, I want to call out that person who is behind that face, behind that tradition, behind that culture, I believe you can do it. I know what was done for me.”
By Marissa R. David
