abstract due to the growing importance and influence of the self of the teacher in the field of educational and cognitive psychology, the current study intended to investigate the relationship between three teacher qualities and characteristics, i.e. teacher self efficacy, self regulation, and success as perceived by their learners. the study aimed at finding whether teacher self efficacy and self regulation can be used to predict teacher success as perceived by students. for this purpose three instruments were applied; teacher self efficacy scale (tses or the so called ohio scale) was used to measure teacher self efficacy. for investigating teacher self regulation teacher self regulation scale (tsrs) was applied. finally to find out about teacher success as perceived by learners, the iranian efl teachers’ success scale was used. 53 (27 males, 26 females) teachers and 530 learners participated in the study. the data gathered was fed into spss 20 and a multiple regression analysis was run. the results suggested that teacher self efficacy and self regulation, in spite of having a correlation with each other and teacher success, cannot predict teacher success as perceived by learners in other words the regression is not significant. thus although teachers’ attitudes and beliefs e.g. self efficacy and self regulation are related to each other and may be good determiners of teacher success. the findings of the current study suggest this may be true only when merely teaches are involved. in other words self efficacy and self regulation do lead to a successful and effective teaching but when the evaluators of this success look at the issue through the professional eyes which learners usually may not especially when they do not know what factors are of significance in defining teachers’ success (strauss, 2012). keywords: self efficacy, self regulation, teacher success and effectiveness