Teacher Dispositions That International Schools Hire For: Lessons From 37 Years

You have the degree. You have the lesson plans, the classroom routines, the years of marking late into the night. And still, when you picture yourself in an international school in Abu Dhabi, Shanghai or Riyadh, a quiet question follows you: is that enough?

It is a fair question. Most teachers spend years building technical skill, and very few people ever tell them what school leaders actually look for when they sit across the interview table. The job description lists qualifications. The real decision often rests on something harder to put on a CV.

Dr. Andrew Torris has sat on the other side of that table for close to four decades. He has led and founded schools in the United States, Saudi Arabia, China and the UAE, and today serves as Interim Head of School at the American International School Abu Dhabi. In a conversation with Rishabh Khanna on Suraasa's Inspiring Educators series, he made a clear case: the teachers who thrive internationally stand out because of their dispositions, the personal habits of mind and heart they bring into every room.

This article takes his argument apart, piece by piece, and turns it into something you can use. If you are planning a move abroad, preparing for interviews, or simply wondering what kind of teacher you want to become, these are the teacher dispositions worth building on purpose.

The Evolution of an International Educator: From Oregon to Global Leadership

Dr. Torris did not start as a global school leader. His story begins in Oregon, in the American public system, and moves outward over decades into some of the most culturally varied school communities in the world. That path matters, because it means his view of good teaching has been tested in very different contexts.

A teacher who has worked in one system can describe what works there. A leader who has opened and run schools across four countries can tell you what holds up everywhere. When a practice survives the move from the United States to Saudi Arabia to China to the UAE, it is no longer a local habit. It is a principle.

That is the lens to bring to everything that follows. Dr. Torris is not describing the ideal teacher for one curriculum or one country. He is describing the qualities he has seen carry teachers through cultural shifts, policy changes, a global pandemic and the arrival of AI.

If you want to hear him make the case in his own words, watch the full conversation below, where Dr. Andrew Torris explains exactly what he looks for when he hires teachers for international schools.

One idea runs through the whole conversation. International teaching rewards people who keep growing. The leaders who hire you are not only asking, "Can this person teach today?" They are asking, "Will this person still be a strong teacher in five years, in a world we cannot fully predict?" If you are mapping that journey for yourself, our guide on building an international teaching career as an Indian teacher lays out the practical steps.

Beyond Hard Skills: Why Dispositions Matter Most in Teacher Recruitment

Ask most teachers what makes a strong application and they will list the visible items: a recognised qualification, curriculum experience, subject expertise, perhaps an IB or Cambridge background. Those things matter. They get you shortlisted.

Dr. Torris argues they rarely decide who gets hired. Skills can be taught. A school can train you in a new assessment model or a new curriculum framework in a matter of months. What a school cannot easily train is who you are when the lesson goes wrong, when a parent pushes back, or when a child in your class is struggling quietly.

His first and most important disposition is almost disarmingly simple. Above any technical skill, he says, teachers must genuinely love being around children. He described it as so obvious it should not need saying, and said it anyway, because in his experience it is the one quality that cannot be faked for long.

He pairs that love with advocacy. In a multicultural school, children arrive with different languages, family expectations and needs. Some will not have anyone else in the building who fully understands them. The teacher Dr. Torris wants to hire is the one who stands up for that child, fiercely and consistently.

What dispositions look like in practice

A disposition is not a slogan on a teaching statement. It shows up in small, repeated choices. Here is how the qualities Dr. Torris highlights translate into everyday behaviour, along with a question you can use to check yourself honestly.

Use this table before an interview. Better still, use it at the end of a hard week. The answers will tell you more about your readiness for international teaching than any certificate list.

Teaching as a Team Sport: Why Solo Practitioners Struggle in Modern Schools

Many teachers learned the profession in a culture of the closed door. You get your class, your timetable and your syllabus, and you get on with it. Success means your students perform well. Collaboration is a meeting on the calendar, not a way of working.

Dr. Torris rejects that model directly:

"Teaching is not a solo sport. It's not golf. It's not singles tennis. It is a team sport, and everybody has to rely on everybody else for the betterment of children."
Dr. Andrew Torris

The comparison is worth sitting with. In golf, your score is yours alone. In a team sport, your individual brilliance means little if the team loses. Students move between teachers every hour. A child's experience of school is the sum of every adult they meet, not the performance of one excellent classroom.

Dr. Torris adds a nuance that many collaboration discussions miss. Good team players know how to lead appropriately, and they also know when to follow. A strong teacher in a grade-level team sometimes drives the conversation, bringing a new idea or a clear plan. At other times the same teacher steps back, supports a colleague's initiative and lets someone else own the outcome.

Building the team disposition

• Share before you are asked. If a resource worked well, send it to your department the same day.
• Bring problems early. Asking a colleague for help with a student is not weakness. It is how teams protect children.
• Practise following well. In your next planning meeting, actively support someone else's proposal, even if you would have done it differently.
• Talk about shared students. Five minutes with the teacher who sees your class next period can change how a struggling child experiences the whole day.

In international schools, where teams often include colleagues from five or six countries, this disposition becomes even more important. You will work alongside people whose training looks nothing like yours. The teacher who can learn from that difference, instead of defending one way of doing things, becomes the colleague everyone wants on their team.

Becoming an Active Learner: Going Beyond Mandatory Professional Development

Here is a situation many teachers will recognise. The school schedules a training day. You attend, take notes, collect a certificate and return to class. Nothing much changes. Professional development happens to you, on someone else's timeline.

Dr. Torris wants something else. The educators he values do not wait for mandatory training. They direct their own learning. They read, experiment, implement new ideas in their classrooms, and then look honestly at the outcome data to see whether the change actually helped students.

Then they take one more step, and this is the one that separates a good teacher from a leader in waiting. They help colleagues learn the same skills. A teacher who figures out a better way to give feedback, and then shows three colleagues how to do it, has multiplied their impact across dozens of classrooms.

A simple cycle for self-directed learning

1. Pick one problem. Choose something specific, such as students not reading feedback, or low participation in group work.
2. Find one strategy. Look for an approach backed by evidence. Our guide to assessment for learning versus assessment of learning is a good place to start if feedback is your focus.
3. Try it for three to four weeks. Give it long enough to settle in.
4. Check the evidence. Look at student work, quiz results or participation patterns, not just how the lesson felt.
5. Share what you found. Tell your team what worked, what did not, and what you would change.

This cycle turns professional growth into a habit rather than an event. It also gives you real stories for interviews. When a principal asks how you develop as a teacher, "I attended all the required training" is a weak answer. "I noticed a problem, tested a solution, measured it and taught it to my department" is the answer Dr. Torris is listening for.

If you want to plan this kind of growth across a full year, our month-by-month CPD planning guide shows how to separate what genuinely counts from what simply fills a log.

Tackling Teacher Attrition: Workload Realities and the Role of AI

Love for children and a commitment to learning only matter if teachers stay in the profession long enough to use them. Dr. Torris did not soften this part of the conversation. He pointed to research indicating that roughly half of new teachers leave within five years, driven by heavy workload, social pressure and constantly rising expectations.

The concern is global. UNESCO's work on the teaching profession tracks shortages across regions and highlights retention as one of the central challenges facing education systems. The OECD's Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) asks teachers in dozens of countries about their working hours, stress and job satisfaction, and workload consistently features as a source of strain.

If you are feeling that weight right now, you are not imagining it, and you are not alone. The marking, the reporting, the emails, the documentation: most teachers did not choose this profession for the paperwork. Yet the paperwork often takes the hours that should belong to planning, to students and to rest.

Dr. Torris sees technology, and AI in particular, as one of the most practical responses. Not as a replacement for the teacher, but as a way to give time back. Tasks that once took an evening, such as drafting differentiated worksheets, writing first versions of parent communications or generating question banks, can now take minutes.

Where AI can realistically lighten the load

• Lesson preparation: generating first drafts of activities, examples and discussion questions that you then refine.
• Differentiation: producing the same text at different reading levels for mixed-ability groups.
• Assessment design: drafting quiz questions and rubrics aligned to your objectives.
• Administrative writing: outlining reports, newsletters and routine emails.

The disposition that matters here is willingness. Teachers who treat AI as a threat to avoid will carry the full weight of the workload by hand. Teachers who learn to use it thoughtfully, and who keep their own professional judgement at the centre, protect their energy for the work only humans can do. Our guide to AI tools for educator productivity goes well beyond basic prompts if you want a concrete starting point.

Notice how this connects back to the active learner disposition. Nobody will schedule a training day for every new tool. The teachers who benefit first are the ones who go and find out for themselves.

Strong Opinions, Held Loosely: Developing Comfort with Ambiguity

Education changes quickly now. Curriculum reforms, new technology, shifting student needs and events nobody predicted, a pandemic most obviously, can rewrite how schools work in a single year. Teachers who need certainty struggle in that environment.

Dr. Torris summed up what he looks for in a phrase worth remembering:

"We want people who have strong opinions held loosely. We want you to keep your mind open, in other words, to ideas and change."
Dr. Andrew Torris

Both halves of that sentence matter. He is not asking for teachers without views. A teacher with no convictions about how children learn will drift. He wants teachers who think deeply, form real positions, and argue for them with evidence. Then, when the evidence or the context changes, they are willing to change their minds.

This is harder than it sounds. Experience can quietly turn into rigidity. The methods that worked for you ten years ago feel like proof of what works, full stop. But the students in front of you today are not the students of ten years ago, and the school you join abroad may run on assumptions very different from the ones you trained under.

The grade is not the goal

Dr. Torris gave one example of a belief he holds strongly and shares often with students. It shows what a well-held opinion looks like:

"It's not about the grade, my young friends. It's not about the grade. The grade is a reflection of your learning. The mark is a reflection of what you've learned. If you learn it, the grades will come. But the key is learning."
Dr. Andrew Torris

For many teachers, especially those trained in exam-heavy systems, this is a genuine shift in mindset. It asks you to move classroom conversations away from marks and toward mastery. Practically, that might mean returning work with comments before grades, letting students revise after feedback, or asking "What did you learn?" before "What did you get?"

Practising comfort with ambiguity

• Each term, test one instructional idea that challenges your usual approach.
• When a policy changes, ask "What problem is this trying to solve?" before deciding it is wrong.
• Keep a short reflection log of beliefs you have changed, and why.
• In disagreements with colleagues, state your view clearly, then ask what evidence would change it.

Teaching Digital Natives: Redesigning Classrooms for Personalized Learning

Think about the world your students live in outside school. Their music apps learn their taste. Their video platforms recommend exactly what they want next. Their games adjust difficulty as they improve. Dr. Torris pointed out that today's students have never known a world without smartphones and personalised algorithms.

Then they walk into a classroom where thirty people receive the same lesson, at the same pace, with the same worksheet. To a student shaped by personalised technology, that one-size-fits-all model can feel strange, even irrelevant. Dr. Torris argued that this clash with students' lived reality is real, and that classrooms need to move toward AI-supported personalisation.

This does not mean handing teaching over to software. It means using the tools now available to do something teachers have always wanted to do but rarely had time for: meet each learner where they are.

What personalisation can look like in a real classroom

Each of these was possible before AI. What has changed is the time cost. Producing three levels of a reading passage once took an hour. It can now take a few minutes, leaving you to check quality and fit. If you want to explore this shift in depth, our article on moving from learning to use AI to AI for learning walks through classroom examples.

Here, again, dispositions decide outcomes. A teacher with strong opinions held loosely will experiment with personalisation. A teacher who learns actively will figure out the tools. A teacher who works as part of a team will share what works. The technology is the same for everyone. The mindset is what makes it useful.

Navigating Cross-Cultural Classrooms: The Importance of Cultural Humility

Moving abroad to teach is exciting. It can also be humbling in ways teachers do not expect. Practices that felt natural at home, such as how you address parents, how you handle a disagreement, or how direct your feedback sounds, can land very differently in a new culture.

Dr. Torris was clear that international teachers cannot simply replicate the practices of their home countries. Having led schools in Saudi Arabia, China and the UAE, he has seen how much depends on understanding local expectations. Teachers who arrive assuming their way is the right way struggle to build trust with families and communities.

His advice is practical and assertive. Teachers should demand and actively seek cultural orientation. If your new school offers onboarding about local customs, attend it fully. If it does not, ask for it. Then go further on your own: read, observe, ask colleagues who have been there longer, and listen to local staff and families.

Questions to ask in your first months abroad

• How do families in this community prefer to receive news about their child, both good and difficult?
• What role do grades and exams play in family expectations here?
• Which religious or national observances affect the school calendar and student wellbeing?
• What forms of address and communication show respect to parents and senior colleagues?
• What do local colleagues wish newly arrived teachers understood sooner?

The underlying disposition is cultural humility: accepting that you are the learner in a new community, even while you are the teacher in your classroom. It connects directly to Dr. Torris's point about child advocacy. You cannot advocate effectively for a child whose family context you do not understand.

For teachers in India considering the move, much of this preparation can start before you leave. Our step-by-step guide on moving from a CBSE school to an international school covers the shift in expectations, and our comparison of the best countries to teach abroad helps you understand the contexts you might be entering.

The Case for Teaching: Transforming Lives in an Era of Global Teacher Shortages

Near the end of the conversation, Rishabh Khanna asked Dr. Torris what he would say to someone considering teaching. His answer was direct:

"If you really want to change the world, though, become a teacher."
Dr. Andrew Torris

It would be easy to hear that as a nice sentiment. Coming from someone who has spent nearly forty years in schools across four countries, it reads more like a conclusion drawn from evidence. Every doctor, engineer, artist and leader passed through a classroom first. Teachers shape the people who shape everything else. It starts with teachers.

Dr. Torris also made the practical case, and he did not shy away from it. International teaching, he said, offers a combination that few careers match. You influence future generations. You live inside different cultures rather than visiting them. You can save money. You earn professional respect. And you build a rich, rewarding life across countries.

The global context strengthens his case. Countries around the world face teacher shortages, and organisations such as UNESCO have repeatedly warned that the world needs millions of additional teachers. In the United States, the National Center for Education Statistics publishes regular data on teacher supply and staffing, a reminder that even well-resourced systems struggle to fill classrooms. For a teacher with the right dispositions, that shortage is a signal: your skills are needed, and they can travel.

Bringing it together

Look back across Dr. Torris's argument and a clear picture forms. The teacher international schools want is someone who:

• Genuinely loves being with children and advocates for them fiercely
• Treats teaching as a team sport, leading and following as the moment requires
• Learns actively, without waiting to be told, and shares that learning with colleagues
• Uses technology, including AI, to manage workload and stay in the profession
• Holds strong opinions loosely and stays calm when things change
• Designs for the digital-native learners actually sitting in the room
• Approaches a new culture with humility and curiosity

None of these qualities appears on a degree certificate. All of them can be developed deliberately. That is the hopeful part of his message. You do not have to be born with the right disposition. You can choose it, practise it and grow into it, one term at a time.

Your next step

Start small and start this week. Pick one disposition from the table near the top of this article. Answer its self-check question honestly. Then choose one action that would move you forward: share a resource with your team, test a new strategy, try an AI tool for your next lesson, or ask a colleague from a different background how they see your classroom.

Growth like this is easier with structure and with people beside you. That is why we built Suraasa as a system that starts with the teacher and stays with them, including the Professional Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning (PgCTL) for teachers who want an internationally recognised path. If you are weighing your options, our comparison of the best teaching certifications for career growth sets out the choices clearly.

But whatever route you take, remember what Dr. Torris spent nearly four decades learning. Qualifications open the door. Dispositions decide how far you go once you walk through it.

You chose this profession with a purpose. Keep building the teacher behind it.

For the Love of Teaching.