Profiling an Ideal Teacher: Voices from Indonesian Vocational High School Students Ade Rianti 1 , * Arini Nurul Hidayati 2 , Dede Pertamana 3 , Agis Andriani 4 , Fuad Abdullah 5 1,2,3,4,5 Siliwangi University, Indonesia. e-mail 1 Riantiade399@gmail.com 2 arininurul@unsil.ac.id 3 dedepertamana@gmail.com 4 agisandriani@unsil.ac.id 5 fuad.abdullah182@gmail.com Abstract. The article presents the perceptions of Indonesian vocational high school students in defining an ideal teacher; what makes a teacher good and bad. This qualitative study employs in-depth interviews to obtain the data. The findings informed that an ideal teacher is the one who builds a positive relationship with the students, for instance, having an individual consideration, easy going, having a deep empathy, motivating, performing comprehensible teaching, enthusiastic, humorous, assertive, humble and patient. Moreover, this type of teacher will also be far from being injustice, antipathy, irresponsible, authoritarian, and short-tempered. Some pedagogical implications are implicitly discussed. Keywords : Indonesian vocational high school students, ideal teacher. INTRODUCTION Evaluative cultures towards the teachers’ performance are ubiquitously happening. In a Kuwaiti Women’s College, for instance, the students are actively engaged in evaluating their professors to establish as the good ones and the bad ones (Algharabali, Shuqair, and Almubayei, 2014). Likewise, Li and Wu (2011) conducted a comparative study about the personality patterns of good teachers and bad teachers in China. They concluded that they are quite different ‘in the aspect of extroversion, neuroticism, psychoticism and dissimulation” (p. 760). Moreover, in German, Raufelder, Nitsche, Breitmeyer, Kebler, Herrmann, and Regner (2015) found that ‘students prioritize teachers’ (inter)personal dimensions over their academic abilities in everyday classroom interactions when evaluating them as educators’ (p. 31). Even though determining teachers as an ideal figure is relatively vague since the individual standards for being good or bad are very wide and extensive depending on many aspects in diverse contexts, these three cases depict that assessing teachers’ performance has become an interesting topic to discuss amongst students across the globe. In Indonesia, there have been complex problems in relation to teachers. Sulisworo, Nasir & Maryani (2016) mention three major teachers’ problems encountered by Indonesia; “low quality of teachers, lack of teacher welfare, and politicization of the teachers (p. 81)”. These factors would definitely have influenced the students’ learning motivation which result in the decrease of their quality of learning and impact on the quality of education. With this regard, unluckily, the first persons who will be very blamed, and responsible to solve those problems are teachers, since they are the main brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by OJS UNPATTI Publication Center (Universitas Pattimura)