Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/teacher-success-is-hiding-in-their-past/5027090/
If a teacher could not identify shapes, colors, letters, or numerals, would you want them to be the adult guiding and supporting young children learning these skills? Of course not! Do you apply that same expectation of competence to a teacher’s social and emotional capacities? If a teacher cannot trust others, can they support an infant’s developing trust? If they cannot disagree with coworkers without defensiveness or manipulation, can they help a toddler develop strategies for respectful conflict? Will a teacher with a negative, defeatist attitude toward life foster a 3-year-old’s creativity, imagination, and dreams of possibility?
As an experienced teacher trainer and coach, I would answer no to all three questions. In fact, in 40 years of working with ECE professionals, my consistent experience is that the desire to improve the lives of children very often rests on an unstable social and emotional foundation–an educator’s own un-improved childhood. When a teacher of young children drags a heavy load of childhood baggage into a classroom and begins unpacking the outcomes of their own early trauma, nobody wins: not the children, not the teacher, not their colleagues, and not the rest of us out in the wider world.
Are there real solutions for the ...