Educators recognize personality characteristics in teaching

Fe A. Mangalino

Educators should recognize that personality characteristics such as attitudes, selfreliance, anxiety, independence and emotional stability have multiple and differential effects on the learning achievements of students.

They should be aware that teachers should pay attention to students personality needs and particular aspects of students with different cultural backgrounds.

The effect of personality characteristics on learning is significant, nonetheless, very little has been done or even suggested regarding the adaptation of teaching to students different personality traits and needs.

Apparently, it is hard to discuss the complexity of the interactions of personality characteristics with various factors that affect learning. It’s very difficult to implement multi-dimensional teaching strategies in the classrooms as experienced by many educators and administrators.

Nonetheless, the interactions between students’ and teachers’ characteristics is possible to analyze and can be closely examine the resulting different learning outcomes.

Educators shared that students of higher ability levels who are also self-reliant, independent, with lower anxiety tend to do better under divergent teaching and selfdirected learning conditions.

However, they said that students of lower ability levels who are also dependent, and anxious, tend to do better under convergent teaching with clear structure and much direction.

With these interactions, they recommend the need to explore further to find more about the various factors affecting the teaching learning process.

The outcomes of such exploration can be very helpful in the search for enhancing teaching effectiveness and students achievements.

In short, matching teaching strategies with students characteristics is a critical step toward dealing with some of the particularly difficult problems of the teaching and learning process.

In their pursuit to adapt instructional strategies to students characteristics, teachers, administrators and even the policy makers are facing many difficulties.

However, the methods and concepts of the field of complex systems can provide ways of implementing such changes in the attempts to introduce reforms to the education system.

The author

is Teacher

--oOo-

I at Pasig Elementary School in the Municipality of Candaba, Pampanga.