What Makes a Good Teacher?

The introduction of the new Teacher Career Model, the School Inspectorate and the Complex School Assessment imply the basic question “What makes a good teacher?” The scholars have been focusing on the issue for a long period of time. The target of the recent studies is the teachers’, school principals’ and the teacher students’ beliefs. The primary and secondary school students’ beliefs have been neglected. This study presents the results of a research in which we explore the secondary school students’ expectations of a good teacher. We carried out an anonymous questionnaire survey and asked the students to write an essay on the good teacher. The results show that the students assess their teachers in a lot of aspects. The categories of the questionnaire and the essays reveal certain personality traits and the eight teaching competences of the recently introduced Teacher Career Model. The students would like to have teachers who put a lot of efforts into helping students with acquisition. Furthermore, personal attention, dealing with the students’ problems, fair treatment and showing respect to each other take the priority in their beliefs. The results of this study regarded as the starting point of a bigger-scale research can contribute to the development of the graduate and postgraduate teacher training system in Hungary.