Research attempts mapping the effective teacher’s profile from the students’ point of view have found that creating (and maintaining) good relations with students and the teacher’s teaching skills are the prevalent traits ( Kutnick and Jules, 1993 Lowman, 1995). Other researchers highlight professional knowledge (in both content and pedagogy of the subject) and personality as the two most important elements of the ideal teacher’s profile. They need to be friendly, be warm, have social skills, and be able to work with the students and share the miracle and the enthusiasm of knowledge ( Ryan, 2003). For this exact reason, teachers are anticipated to be more than experts in their field. In questioning “why some teachers are better than others,” Ryan (2003), in his book on teaching and learning, commented that the effective teacher does not simply transfer information to the student regarding a specific subject but actually interacts with the other person. The effective, the good, the great, the successful, or the ideal teacher has been in various educational debates for more than a century and has led to various categories and lists of characteristics and qualities ( Blishen, 1969 Kratz, 1896 Symonds, 1947). And the answers are in most of the cases more or less focused on inspiring and motivating music teachers who supported them, who believed in them, who cared and were friendly, and with whom they developed a personal relationship. For them, going back in time and realizing key moments in their musical lives and key people that either supported them or had a negative effect within their journey makes it easier to identify those great or not so great teachers, who possibly even had a powerful influence on the pathways they followed. “Who is/are your favorite music teacher/s and why?”, is the first question that my undergraduate students are called to answer in our first week of classes, right after they sketch their musical journey map from the moment they recall there was some kind of relationship to music, to the moment they entered my Foundations of Music Education class. By building on the findings, the paper establishes recommendations for music teacher education and teacher effectiveness, as these are framed through the students’ eyes and experiences. The students’ voices call firstly for a polite, friendly, with sense of humor, kind teacher, patient, pleasant, fair, and creative. The findings reveal that the characteristics of the ideal music teacher deemed more important for secondary school students fall mainly in the category of personality and interpersonal characteristics, with pedagogical and subject knowledge and skills following, with much smaller percentages. Is it a matter of personality characteristics, subject knowledge, and skills or a matter of pedagogy? Or is it a combination of the aforementioned? And more specifically, what are those qualities, personal characteristics, and competencies of the ideal music teacher through the eyes of students? 518 secondary school students participated in the study by completing an anonymous questionnaire. The present study investigates what makes and what does not make an ideal music teacher according to secondary school students’ views and perceptions. Department of Music and Dance, School of Education, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus.
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