Education
4 Signs Your Child Has a Good Teacher
Effective educators apply the science of learning to benefit their students.
Posted March 10, 2026 Reviewed by Margaret Foley
It’s fairly easy to know if your child’s teacher is a good person. You can observe the teacher’s demeanor at open houses and parent-teacher conferences throughout the year. You can also ask other parents about a particular teacher.
In most cases, it’s reasonable to assume that your kid’s teacher is a good person. In my experience, almost all elementary and middle school teachers are kindhearted individuals. They chose the profession of teaching because they want to help others and like kids.
Determining if someone is a good teacher, however, is not as easy. Being a good teacher requires much more than being kindhearted. And it’s definitely not the same as being popular. One of the most popular teachers at my high school was a charming guy who rode a motorcycle and told entertaining stories in class. I learned almost nothing from him.
When I say “good teacher,” I mean a professional educator who knows (1) the science behind how people learn and (2) how to design activities that will help students learn more, learn faster, learn better. You may think all teachers learn this stuff in their education courses in college. Sadly, they do not.
Signs of a Good Teacher
Here are four signs that your child has a good teacher. (If a lot of this sounds like good coaching, that’s not a coincidence.)
First, good teachers understand that the most important difference between high-achieving students and low-achieving students is not their innate intellectual capacity but their level of motivation.
When I was a teacher, I loved having a classroom full of students who wanted to learn and succeed. Of course, some students don’t have that kind of desire—at least not at first. Good teachers figure out ways to motivate their students to attend class, pay attention, do the assigned reading, and study hard for tests.
Second, good teachers understand the benefit of practice and the importance of repetition with variation.
Periodic practice, especially when it’s spaced out, leads to the acquisition of new skills and strengthens recently formed memories (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014). This is true for learning to ride a bike, memorizing times tables, plotting data on a graph, and hundreds of other things.
The creators of video games (think Angry Birds) and online language courses (think Duolingo) understand this principle better than most. Motivated gamers and language learners can develop impressive skills fairly quickly, thanks to repetition.
Third, good teachers downplay competition and create opportunities for cooperative learning.
Students learn best when they work with their peers, not against them (Kohn, 1992). Group projects, team presentations, and peer teaching are effective ways to learn because they require students to understand and explain a concept to someone else. Working with others also fosters empathy and reduces prejudice (Aronson & Thibodeau, 2006).
Fourth, good teachers give students immediate feedback on their performance and progress. Good teachers also create opportunities for students to give feedback to each other.
Dozens of studies have demonstrated that people learn best when they receive prompt and frequent feedback (Naylor et al., 2014). This is true in all kinds of circumstances—learning how to play chess, calculate the area of a circle, bake a cake, shoot a free throw, or speak a foreign language.
Red Flags
As a bonus, here are three warning signs that a teacher is probably not a good teacher. These are considered red flags because they indicate a teacher is poorly informed about the science of learning and teaching.
- A teacher administers a test and says your child is a visual (or auditory or kinesthetic) learner.
Oy! The myth of different learning styles was thoroughly debunked years ago (Pashler et al., 2008). Some students have learning preferences, but teaching to those preferences doesn’t improve learning. Good teachers know that.
- A teacher is opposed to testing students in all circumstances.
Yikes! When used properly, quizzes and tests can be a highly effective teaching technique. Testing students on what they’ve studied is one of the best ways to help them learn (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014).
- A teacher does not assign homework or tells students the homework is optional.
Doh! When students do homework, they’re more likely to understand and remember concepts in science, math, history, language arts, and more (Cooper, Robinson, & Patall, 2006).
Teachers should know these things. If they don’t, they’re probably not a good teacher.
References
Aronson, E., & Thibodeau, R. (2006). The jigsaw classroom: A cooperative strategy for reducing prejudice. In Cultural Diversity and the Schools (pp. 231-255). Routledge.
Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Harvard University Press.
Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C., & Patall, E. A. (2006). Does homework improve academic achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987–2003. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 1-62.
Kohn, A. (1992). No Contest: The Case against Competition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Naylor, R., Baik, C., Asmar, C., & Watty, K. (2014). Good feedback practices: Prompts and guidelines for reviewing and enhancing feedback for students. Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne.
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119.
