“Buen o buena docente” desde la perspectiva de estudiantes que han egresado de educación secundaria

Abstract

The “good teacher” is a person who has transcendentally marked and influenced the personal and academic students’ life, and his/her image remains in the students’ school memory as a prolonged and highly positive souvenir. Therefore, to know what are their main traits and why they had an impact in such a way on their students is worth to be analyzed in order to be a contribution to the study of teaching in basic education. In this perspective, the main objective of this empirical research is to analyze the characteristics of the “good teacher” from the perception of students graduated from public and private secondary schools in Lima, Peru. The results of this qualitative research, based on semi-structured interviews to eight graduated students, showed some characteristics of the relationship between the “good teacher” and the students: high engagement with the students, positive perception and motivation to them, and affective quality of the teacher-student interaction. In addition, the data revealed other characteristics of the “good teacher” and his/her profession such as passion for teaching, command of knowledge, and organization of the class. The study concludes that the recognition of at least one good teacher by graduated students reveals the heterogeneity in kinds of teachers; this heterogeneity demands to overcome negative generalizations and that the teacher’s image is a collective construction in several graduation years. One implication of this study to the educational policy and research areas is to pay more attention to former students and this in order to improve our understanding on the schooling experience and the relationship between teachers and students.