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1. Commit to being a lifelong learner.

As a teacher, you will have to continue to learn from multiple sources of knowledge throughout your career. You have the opportunity to learn from practice, mistakes, from your students, other teachers and administrators.

The commitment also comprises aggressively challenging yourselves to excel. Opportunities to learn are all around the classroom and the school. With each new student adds a new challenge and a new chance to learn. Professional development, workshops, conferences, or furthering your education are all avenues to obtaining knowledge. Although a degree is a great starting point, teaching looks very different when you are on the field than when you’re a student in a classroom. And teachers who are continuous learners are modeling the importance of learning to their students.

2. Use the curriculum responsibly.

While a nation may provide you with a curriculum to teach, you as the teacher decide what is important, how to make it interesting and relevant, and how to measure the progress. Responsibility to the curriculum means teachers actively make choices that allow them to best meet the needs of the learners.

3. Cross your barriers to meet the needs of all learners.

Teachers must embrace diversity, including differences in ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status and sexual orientation. You must take steps to ensure that you don’t marginalize or exclude any students because their beliefs differ from yours. You must also commit to bridge the gap, at least with all your students and would be best if also with their families.

4. Meet the needs of individual students.

While a classroom is one large group by design, it is made of many unique individuals with unique needs. You can meet learners’ needs by providing a variety of teaching methods, including direct instruction, grouping students, and rearranging the groups as needed. The teaching methods should also include proper techniques for the audio, video and kinesthetic learners. To reach the individual student, you must strive to motivate each individual, involve him or her in learning, and understand how to teach everyone, not simply aim to teach the average student. You must also be an advocate for your students as individuals, ensuring that they have all the resources they need to succeed.

5. Academics without character is futile.

Teachers are not only to teach the students about the facts and figures. In future the profession of a teacher will be in verge of extinction if they focus only on teaching the technicalities of their subjects as every student is in reach to the open book of worldwide enormous knowledge just a few clicks away in their hands. A teacher now should instill a sense of good character and self-worth. Knowledge gives power, character gives respect and a person without character is a living corpse. The entire would needs a generation with talent and a humanitarian character who can use their talent for positive changes and that’s where you as a teacher can bring a change in your students.

6. Actively contribute to the profession.

Collaborating and contributing to the school and classrooms are not just part of the job; they are teachers’ responsibilities. Active teachers seek to advance and improve all areas of education. Passive teachers, on the other hand, come to work to do their minimum to collect a paycheck. Teaching is not a nine-to-five job where you can clock in and clock out at the same time every day without a thought to things being left undone; teaching is a process that must be constantly nurtured by all stakeholders, especially teachers.

To the world you may be just a teacher, to the students you are a HERO. And a veteran teacher brings out the best in the students. In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for less. Only the committed teachers can change the whole world.