What does it take to be a teacher

You are not born to be a teacher. You do not need to have certain genes to become a teacher. It is a matter of your attitude to life and to your fellow citizens. You have to create an open minded approach. You must be curious and have a great wish to be inspired from all sides. You have to demand not to waste your precious time by standing still on the same spot.
You must learn to use your common sense and challenge yourself with demands of new learning and new methods, because a teacher will need all this to teach his students the very best.

When things are not good enough, you have to change them and do them over again, to get the very best result. You learn to be demanding and ambitious not on behalf of others, but in respect of one another and all the things that you can actually do.

Of course, the curriculum at DNS has a comprehensive number of subjects and includes a number of heavy books, but the human skills that are mentioned here are a definite part of the curriculum that require patience, skills, interest and a hands-on attitude. They have brought a change of culture to the meaning of the word “teacher”. At DNS, a culture has been established that emphasizes that the most important part of being a teacher is that you demand of yourself at all times to be able to change or fill out what you need to do, in order to deliver as an inspiring and dynamic teacher.
 
At the Necessary Teacher Training College the teachers and the students, together as partners, plan the education - both the content and the concrete details, in contrast with other overly structured school forms.

The programme is untraditional and challenging (Study trip by own buses to Africa, extensive teaching practice in Europe, social work with youngsters in Denmark) and covers a wide variety of theoretical and practical skills, a lot of experiences in many areas and emphasis on personal development of the future teacher through big challenges.

Around the world there is a great need for capable teachers. Teachers who can, through their teaching abilities, achieve something out of the ordinary. Teachers who are trained amply in multiple skills and who have many and important life experiences from the world and its future, from their own country, from children and young people as such, from learning and changing - and thus can deliver and catalyze the world of knowledge and essence to the next generation.

As a student in the DNS program you can regard yourself as part of a global movement. When facing huge tasks like education and development in rural areas, it is needed that many forces join hands. This is the road to actually influencing and changing the situation. This is also a tremendous inspiration to you as an individual teacher, who in this way will see your efforts as part of something bigger.

DNS in Denmark has so far trained app. 600 teachers that are now all over the world, teaching, training, educating, managing and leading. It is very necessary to educate good teachers for bringing up the many children in the world – the privileged as well as the underprivileged – and it is necessary to do this using many more methods than books and blackboards.