Inner Qualities of Educators

08/15/2007

Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.
Mother Teresa

My life in early childhood education began in 1959 when I took over the Sunday morning kindergarten class in my local United Methodist Church. I mention the denomination because the Methodist tradition has been highly devoted to education as witnessed especially by the number of colleges and universities it has sponsored and supported. The 1964 revised curriculum for preschool classes, birth through kindergarten, were a model of “theologically- and psychologically-appropriate” activities for children of those ages.

Thus, an article that appeared in the November 1967 issue of Young Children by Dorothy Wiseman Gross, a Brooklyn College early childhood professor, caught my attention some years later. In “Teachers of Young Children Need Basic Inner Qualities,” Professor Gross comments that most writings on early childhood address “how children learn and what we should teach them.” While universities create extensive teacher preparation courses of study, “the heart of the matter — the inner qualities needed for working effectively with young children — has been strangely overlooked.”

The five “inner qualities” Professor Gross describes are:

There is enjoyment in learning. “... If we wish our children to love learning we must provide them with teachers who love learning.”
There is the ability to distinguish between personal and others’ needs. “[The teacher] will be less likely to interpret children’s and parent’s behavior as either personal tribute or personal threat....”
There is knowledge about how young children learn. “[The teacher] must be able to constantly adapt and invent curriculum so that it flows with the tide of the children’s learning.” Gross notes that this is the quality most focused on by educators and trainers.
The teacher must have a personality which is comfortable with open-endedness. “... The basic inclination towards the unanswered question — the journey rather than the arrival — is a necessary quality in one who would work with young children.”
The teacher must take pleasure in working with parents. “[The teacher] must be non-defensive and flexible enough to accept parents’ ideas and contributions while developing the self-confidence and professional maturity to give them the help they need and want.”

“But without some degree [of all of these qualities], concern with how children learn becomes meaningless and even mechanical.”

Contributed by Edna Ranck

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