TEACHER BELIEFS IN THE QUALITIES OF A GOOD TEACHER : A THEMATIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Most educational programs aimed to produce good teachers because feelings and attitude of teachers
can affect the teaching and learning process. What is open to debate are the characteristics to define
good teachers. There are many studies by previous researchers that developed lists, models, and
taxonomies that identify traits of good teachers in variety of investigation technique. However, there
is scarce research on defining good teachers’ characteristics using thematic analysis. The aim of this
research was to further explore the views of teachers on their beliefs on the characteristics of a good
teacher using thematic analysis. Three teachers were interviewed to find out their views on qualities
of a good teacher and the data were compared to three related articles. Thematic analysis of the data
allowed three themes to be constructed – Knowledgeable, The Teachers’ Attitude and The Teachers’
Role. The results show that good teachers should be knowledgeable and have certain characteristics.
This result can be used as a starting point for a bigger research scale that can contribute to the
teacher training program in Malaysia.