Determining the Characteristics of a Virtuous Teacher : Impact of Selected Virtues in Practice

Teachers are the incarnations of ethics, morals and values that they impart to the students with an aim to direct, educate and motivate students in accomplishing the mission of being a responsible citizen of the society. Studies claim that students tend to be more competent when they are able to apply virtues. As teachers play a significant role in forming and shaping the moral characters of their students, it is essential to understand that teachers set examples to their students by demonstrating through example. The role and the responsibility of the teachers is to disperse knowledge and information but little attention is been paid to the essential virtues that teachers need to adopt and introduce in the classroom. The main objective of the paper is to determine the characteristics of a virtuous teacher. Data for the study was collected from 423 teachers, teaching in schools, colleges and universities across India through a questionnaire that consisted of a number of components dealing with the characteristics of a teacher. Since it was difficult to accept all the components, factor analysis technique was implemented to condense the most essential qualities of a virtuous teacher. Further, co-relation and binary logistic regression analysis was implemented to find out how much impact these qualities create in order to define the characteristics of a virtuous teacher. Results indicated that the components that are essential to determine the qualities of a virtuous teachers are communication, fairness, responsibility, focus, care, humour, interest and commitment.