Early Childhood Teacher - Essay Example

A good early childhood teacher should have an understanding of what he or she needs to accomplish with his or her students. While the typical knowledge is that teachers need to impart knowledge like a person stocking meat inside a sausage casing, I believe that they should be more aware of the fact that students have this innate capability to learn and reason out. Thus, learning does not necessarily mean spoon feeding the children with the things that they need to know where the teacher takes an active role and the students wait passively.

Teachers should be able to elucidate knowledge from the children by stimulating their young minds and enabling them to learn. The children need to take an active part in learning. They should not be there only to accept what the teacher imparts to them but they should be able to enhance their capabilities of bringing out the innate capacity to think and reason out. One of the best examples of this is Socrates' dialectics where he constantly asks questions to youth enabling him to stimulate their reasoning abilities.

He makes his student's realize that they are capable of thinking beyond and out of the box (Socratic Seminars 2008). In a school setting, this should be used to small children in order for them to acquire the ability to depend themselves through rational thinking. For example, instead of directly saying that gravity pulls everything into the earth surface, the teacher should ask students what happens when something is dropped. Then follow it up with why they think it is so. Then, he or she could explain that this is because of a force which pushes everything down.

The good teacher can also ask students instances when they think that the law of gravity is violated. Small children are very good imitators. In fact, they often learn things that they directly see in their parents, teachers, and other persons making up their immediate environment. Imitating words and actions are their way of learning and exploring their environment. Because of this, a good early childhood education teacher is one who lives up to what he or she teaches inside the classroom. A teacher should teach through his or her good example.

It should be noted that when parents send their children to school, it is not just the mental and intellectual capacity which they expect to nourish but also their children's character. Thus, it is important that the teacher's attitude and behavior mirrors a decent individual who is morally excellent. A good early childhood teacher should be able to display a character which is pleasing to every parent or student. He or she should be aware that her actions will strongly impact and shape the moral development of his or her students.

Name calling, bad words, impatience, dishonesty, and unfairness have no place inside a classroom where small children are intended to become decent citizens (Muir 2007). A teacher should be able to back by her actions the words that he or she preaches inside the classroom. It is irrefutable that small children honor and respect their teachers even more than their parents because of their knowledge. They see their mentors as