Janet Fine wrote: Teachers are often viewed as competent if they are living up to the standards the school has established. Keeping up with the competition by publishing the required papers or lecturing on different panels does make a teacher better known but does not make a better teacher. Arthur Combs wrote in an essay “The Personal Approach to Good Teaching” that “If we know what the expert teachers do, or are alike, then we can teach the beginners to be like that.”According to Combs many investigations on the competency of a good teacher have been made, but basic results show that good teaching can not simply be defined in terms of any particular trait. One study demonstrated that a number of general classes of behaviour seemed to be characteristic of good teachers.
“The creation of long lists of competencies is likely to be deeply discouraging and disillusioning to the young teacher,” says Combs. “Evaluations of ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ become attached to method, and students there after are expected to judge their own adequacies in these terms. The net effect is to set such impossible goals of excellence that no one can ever hope to reach them.”
