The changing conditions of the socio-political, economic and cultural life give rise to the new questions concerning the teacher's professional role, which require both a closer scrutiny and the creation of the new concepts. Despite numerous works on teaching and teacher education, little attention has been paid to the search for the essence of a good teacher and of the teacher's success and its conditions. This paper aims to explore many aspects of the search for improved teaching. It discusses two central questions determining the work of teachers: What are the essential qualities of a good teacher? What are the conditions of teacher's success? However, the objective of the paper is not to present definitive answers to these questions. I believe the answers may be various depending on the context, and perhaps it is even impossible to formulate the definitive descriptions of 'the good teacher' and 'teacher's success'. However, I do intend to offer a framework for discussion of such norms. The paper consists of two parts. In its first part a variety of theoretical references to the approaches and traditions dealing with the widely seen field of teacher work is presented, and consequently an attempt to translate them into the problems of being a good teacher and conditions of teachers' success, is undertaken. The critical analysis of the publications belonging to most representative of the contemporary pedagogical thoughts on the qualities of a good teacher and the conditions of the teacher's work forms a basis for the considerations about the essence of the teacher's success. In the second part of the paper the preliminary findings from the study, which sought to examine the conditions of teacher's success, are presented and some of their implications are explored. This part attempts to give the answers - on the basis of the obtained research findings - to the following detailed questions: *What specific categories of factors have an impact on achieving professional success by teachers and what relationships between these categories exist? What factors facilitate and reinforce achieving professional success by teachers? What factors hamper achieving professional success by teachers? How do teachers make use of the facilitating factors and overcome the hampering ones? *What is the role and place of the school as the teacher's workplace in achieving the teacher's professional success? Does - and if so then to what extent - the school stimulate and support the teachers in achieving professional success? Have any institutional solutions facilitating achieving professional success by teachers been introduced - and if so then what kind of them? What differences in terms of teachers' professional successes can be found in various schools? The content of the proposed is certainly the source of questions that may result in opening on new research challenges in teacher education.