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The impact of a great teacher can be lifelong. We sat down with Gia-Yen Luong, Senior Advisor for Government Relations at Teach For Australia, to find out the qualities required to make a significant and lasting impact on students.
Key takeaways
Teacher quality is the most controllable factor in student outcomes, making the decision to invest in great teaching one of the highest-impact choices the school system can make
The qualities that define effective teachers, including strong communication, empathy, subject knowledge, and reflective practice, are developed through training and experience. They are not innate.
Teach For Australia places high-achieving graduates in the schools where great teaching is needed most, supporting them to build these qualities from day one in the classroom.
In Australia, your postcode still shapes your education. That’s a reality lived every day by students in communities facing disadvantage. One of the most powerful levers we have to change it is teaching, as we know that high-quality teaching changes trajectories.
Research consistently shows that of all the factors affecting a student’s educational outcomes, teacher quality is the one the system can most easily control.
This article draws on Gia-Yen Luong’s expertise and experience to explore what the qualities of a good teacher actually look like, how they develop, and why they matter so much in today’s classrooms.
Quality teaching can come down to a combination of personal capability, professional skill, and reflective practice. These qualities are not innate, but developed through training, evidence-based practice, and experience in the classroom.
The 7 qualities below are grounded in what drives student learning and wellbeing, particularly in complex school environments where the stakes are highest.
Strong communication
Great teaching makes the complex accessible. That means breaking down difficult ideas, checking for genuine understanding, and adjusting when the explanation isn’t landing. In classrooms shaped by diverse learning needs and backgrounds, communication is a core skill.
Empathy and emotional intelligence
Effective teachers understand that behaviour exists in context. They respond to students in ways that build trust and dignity, while holding high expectations at the same time.
Gia-Yen outlined the concept of “unconditional positive regard”: a baseline belief that every student is worth your best effort, regardless of their background, behaviour, or need.
“You don’t have to love them in a sentimental sense, but you need to have this disposition, this baseline understanding that every student is worth your best effort,” she said.
“They’re a human being and they’re in your classroom, you’re responsible for them.”
“You don’t have to love them in a sentimental sense, but you need to have this disposition, this baseline understanding that every student is worth your best effort.” – Gia-Yen Luong
Classroom leadership and consistency
Safe, structured learning environments are built deliberately. Through consistent expectations, clear routines, and a culture where students feel secure enough to participate and take risks, teachers create the conditions for learning to happen. In complex school environments, this kind of leadership is foundational.
Adaptability
Effective teachers are always looking for, and responding to, data on their students’ progress. This allows them to adjust instruction in the moment, try different approaches, and recognise that what works for one student may not work for another. Equitable teaching demands this level of flexibility in response to student needs.
Subject knowledge and pedagogy
Strong subject knowledge matters, and so does knowing how to teach it. Gia-Yen described teaching as a practice-based profession built on moment-to-moment decisions: how to sequence a lesson, how to question students in ways that draw out understanding, how to assess what has been learned.
“What you will notice when you go into a classroom with a really strong teacher is that you won’t be able to tell that they’re doing the work,” she said.
“You see someone calm, someone kind, coming across engaging positively with their students.
“But you wouldn’t know that underneath they are making very clear, very precise decisions.”
Commitment to equity
The best teachers make an impact on their students’ lives and address inequities in education through quality practice. Specifically, this means holding high expectations for every student, providing differentiated instruction where needed and refusing to accept that a student’s background will decide their results.
Reflective practice
The best teachers also understand themselves as learners. They use feedback, student data, and honest self-assessment to identify what is working and what is not, and they adjust accordingly.
Gia-Yen compared it to learning to drive: at first you need to be consciously checking every mirror. Over time, the checks become muscle memory.
“A good teacher,” she said, “is doing that reflective practice on the go and continuously thinking ‘what can I be doing better in this moment, in this lesson and in this week or term or year’.”
Gia-Yen addressed one of the most persistent myths about teaching: that great teachers are born, not made.
“Great teachers are made,” she said.
“Made through their life experiences, made through their teacher education or teacher preparation program, and they’re made through their experiences in the classroom and how they are supported to process and reflect on those experiences.”
These qualities develop through structured professional development, mentoring and coaching, evidence-based practice, and sustained time in the classroom. This is particularly important in schools experiencing educational disadvantage, where effective teaching can shift long-term outcomes for students.
A key moment in Gia-Yen’s own practice came about eight months into teaching at a school in the Northern Territory. Her teaching and leadership advisor, who also served as her coach, asked her a single question that stopped her in her tracks: what do you actually think these students are capable of?
“In the moment I was totally frozen,” she recalls, “but what was happening in my brain was: oh yeah, well, I think they could probably maybe finish school.
“Wait a second, why do I think that?”
That question shifted everything.
By changing her own beliefs about what her students could achieve, Gia-Yen said, she “essentially uncapped her students’ potential”.
The learning that followed, for the rest of that year and the year after, exceeded what anyone in the school had expected of those students.
This fundamental shift in what a teacher believes their students are capable of is what structured support and mentoring makes possible.
Impact extends well beyond the classroom door. Great teachers collaborate with colleagues to improve outcomes across a whole school, sharing strategies, building shared approaches, and contributing to a culture where every staff member is working toward the same goal.
They engage with families and communities, recognising that student success is shaped by far more than what happens during school hours. And they contribute to school culture in ways that ripple outward, influencing how a school feels, what it values, and who belongs.
Gia-Yen reflected on this broader reach when she talks about what it means to invest in early career teachers.
“If you can think about a classroom of 25 students with very different needs, very different backgrounds, and truly believe that every single one of them is valuable, worthwhile, and can do it, can you imagine the impact that has on the rest of society that comes into contact with that teacher?” she said.
Together with schools, Alumni, and communities we want to rewrite the story of Australian education. That kind of change starts with teachers who understand that their work extends beyond their own students, and who show up with that in mind every day.
Today’s classrooms are shaped by diversity, complexity, and rising expectations. The role of a teacher has grown into something bigger: leading learning, advocating for students, and contributing to change across an entire system.
For high-achieving graduates, teaching through Teach For Australia is a chance to put capability into action, in the schools and communities where strong teaching has the greatest impact.
Through the Teach For Australia program, you can:
This work is challenging and holds the potential for real change, on a systems level. We believe that working together, we can deliver Australia’s classrooms a brighter future. Our movement is ready to make the difference.
Learn more about Teach For Australia’s Leadership Development Program
What are the Big Five personality traits of teachers?
The Big Five personality traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. A peer-reviewed meta-analysis by Kim, Jörg and Klassen, covering more than 6,000 teachers, found that four of the five domains — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and emotional stability — were positively associated with teacher effectiveness, particularly in evaluations of teaching. Agreeableness was the exception, showing no consistent positive association.
Personality is only one part of the picture, though. As Gia-Yen puts it, great teachers are made, and the qualities that drive genuine student impact can be built through training, experience, and professional development.
What are the 7 responsibilities of a teacher?
Great teachers carry responsibilities that extend well beyond delivering lessons. Understood through an equity and impact lens, those responsibilities are:
Teaching, delivering well-planned, evidence-based instruction that genuinely reaches every student.
Student wellbeing, recognising and responding to the full picture of what students need to learn.
Assessment, using data and feedback to understand where students are and inform what comes next.
Classroom leadership, building safe, structured environments where all students can participate and take risks.
Collaboration, working with colleagues to improve outcomes across the whole school.
Communication, keeping students, families, and communities informed and engaged.
Professional learning, committing to ongoing development and reflective practice to keep improving.
