It’s hard to say what exactly will help you find your teaching voice and your identity as an instructor, but I can certainly say, from my experience, being a good learner is imperative. I found that one of the most important things to finding my teaching voice was finding what was important to my own learning experiences. In order to do that, I had to be an active learner in any experience I could. What was it about a particular class that made assignments manageable to complete? What were the most important things instructors did that made lectures consumable?
Being able to reflect on all of these things and culminate the best experiences (and the lessons from the worst) into your personal style and firm teaching ideals is all that is needed to find your way to a teaching voice. Personally, I feel that as long as I am keeping a good sense of empathy for my students and fostering some sense of critical thinking or academic exploration, then I am successful as an instructor. This is not to say that I will find a set of ideals and stick to them forever; things change and so do we. It’s important to not just stick to a particular set of rules forever. Obviously, the important things like empathy, integrity, and critical thinking should be the foundation for all teaching philosophies, but that doesn’t mean how we express our teaching voice must remain the same.
Times change, students change, needs change, and so must our teaching voices. In order to do this, not only do we have to be good learners, but we have to be constantly learning. Being a good teacher isn’t an irrevocable status, the definition of a good teacher changes with the needs of students. So, as teachers, our methods and values must change and, consequently, so will our teaching voices.