Teaching is one of the most challenging professions in the world. This is so because as a teacher, one gets to interact with a variety of personalities in one setting and therefore has got to devise mechanisms of identifying these personalities and addressing each individual personality according to their own needs and wants. A class of thirty students will comprise of thirty different personalities and it is the role of the teacher to address these student’s personalities without excluding any. Identifying the student’s strengths and weaknesses therefore is the most important thing to do. In order to meet the objectives of the teaching and learning objectives, a good teacher will have to understand the nature of the learners they have in a given setting. There are several ways through which this can be done and one of them is by use of the personality colors description as postulated by Mary Miscisin in her book Showing Our Colors. Personality color description comes in handy when it comes to assessing the personalities of the learners and how best to address their individual personalities in an effort to make it easy to teach them.
It is always good to understand oneself as a teacher before reaching out to the learners. Miscisin puts to perspective the way a teacher can go about understanding themselves before making an effort to understand the learners. She uses four different colors, Blue- compassionate, Green- responsible, Orange- spontaneous and Gold- conceptual, each color representing a certain dominant personality. At each given time, a person, even with their dominant personality, and also can be at different levels for instance, when the person is high spirited or under stress. The point that she tries to put across is the fact that people go through different phases in life and a good example can be seen through the section on ‘when colors fade.’ It is therefore imperative to take into account the fact that personalities vary and each single student or even teacher have their own. Finding the best way out, how to communicate well with these different personalities is the best thing that can ever happen to a teacher because in so doing, they will have captured the easiest ways of addressing each individual personality in a classroom setting.
In the article Temperament Identification Methods and Silumation, it is clear that teaching techniques have changed with time with the coming in of technological advancements like the computer and internet. But the article seeks to inform the reader that is very important to customize training and this applies to the teaching and learning process. When the teaching is customized to address different learners and their personalities, the ultimate goal of teaching will have been accomplished because then, the learner will have been met at their personal points of need (Lauberte, Ginters, & Cirulis 2006). If only the teachers could have a package that suits and accommodates everybody in the classroom then teaching will be fun to them and enjoyable to the learner. Various tests therefore need to be done with the sole aim of identifying the intelligence of the learners and their personalities as well. Traditional mechanisms can be employed but again, more detailed and analytical mechanisms such as card games and picture or color tests have proven to be very helpful (Lauberte, Ginters, & Cirulis 2006)
In Child Development and Classroom Teaching: A Review of the Literature and Implications for Educating Teachers, it is stated that teachers should be in a position to figure out, within the shortest time possible, the strengths and weaknesses of individual students. It is imperative that his is done at the beginning of a school year because in so doing, it will be easier to device mechanisms that can be used on each individual student. Interest inventories may come in handy aside from conducting personality surveys and benchmarking assessments. Student cognitive and social development is a very important aspect that needs to be addressed if at all the learners are to benefit from the teaching and learning process. The role of the teacher is what determines how this is done failure of which the teaching process may be termed incompetent (Daniels & Shumow 2002)
Many people will definitely have a combination of several colors. This is proven by the fact that they exhibit different personalities for their convenience at different times. The article On the Relation of Color and Personality it is clear that when this is put into perspective, a teacher will definitely have a tough time trying to address these multiple colors more so when it comes to learners who exhibit multiple intelligences. The mode of communication plays a major role in such situations because it is through inventing, that such situations or crises can be handled. It might turn out to be a disaster when addressing a learner in ways that do not befit their colors. Understanding how color preferences can be used to determine the personalities of a learner to some extent helps address some of the problems that a teacher may find in a class. Color preference predicts personality patterns in regard to the observable traits that can be seen in the learners (Schaie 1966). Color response is good enough when it serves as a guiding principle upon which a teacher is going to draw a line between the individual learners. In so doing, it is beyond reasonable doubt that the teacher will have accomplished one of the most important tasks that they are subjected to and that is, understanding and addressing the needs of every individual learner (Schaie 1966).
Having an array of personalities to address and several academic strengths and weakness makes the teaching profession exciting and interesting. It would have been boring after all, when one gets into a class and finds all students are Blue, Green, Gold and orange. A mixture of several personalities is interesting and it makes the teacher want to unravel the mysteries of the intelligence, personality and academic capabilities of each individual learner and try to reach out to all of them and fuse them together. It is beneficial to the students as well because as they interact and relate with each other, they will get to know the different personalities that exist in society and therefore develop ways of coexisting and this is put into perspective in the article Visual Object Ability: A New Dimension of Non- Verbal Intelligence (Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov, 2010). A school as an institution brings together personalities which may not have met out there and it is through their interaction that people get to appreciate others in society. A school setting provides this platform which in the long run helps unravel the traits that we see outside the school setting such as places of work.
In the article Personalities in The classroom: Making the most of Them it is clear that teachers too have their individual personalities that they have to fuse with those of the learners. A teacher’s personality and intelligence traits are seen through the way in which they give instructions or teach. The various instruction strategies that they employ are always related to who they really are. Aside from just concentrating on ways of making the learners fit in the classroom, the teacher too should device mechanisms that are going to help them fuse into the nature of their classroom (Richardson & Arker 2010). A good example can be seen through one teacher, teaching a class in an upcountry setting and a town setting interchangeably. The way in which that teacher is going to address the former is quite different from the way in which he is going to address the latter. It is therefore very important, that the teacher uses teaching styles that best suit their learners depending on very many factors among them their location and social influences. In so doing, a teacher will have met the learners at their points of need in regard to their environment or setting which is one of the very important things that need to be factored in an effort to put the learners into perspective more especially when determining their personalities in regard to where they come from.
Multiple intelligence issues in totality need to be addressed so as to address the intelligence potential of learners. This is an area that needs constant updating and research because different environments and happenings to a huge extent determine how learners go about the learning process. As a teacher, I would like to know about trending issues and how they need to be addressed in the teaching process. I need to know the various colors and personalities and therefore come up with my own ways of going about meeting the needs of each one of them. Also the inventory programs and games that may help me here need to be elaborate and easy to follow. They should also be enjoyable in order to easily bring out the student personalities. This is very important because teachers and all stakeholders will have been enabled to understand the different personalities in their classrooms which will in the long run help achieve the main objectives of the teaching and learning process.
References
Blazhenkova, O. & Kozhevnikov, M. (2010). Visual Object Ability: A New Dimension of Non- Verbal Intelligence. Cognition, Vol. 117, Issue 3. 276- 301. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027710002015
Daniels, H. D. & Shumow, Lee. (2002). Child Development and Classroom Teaching: A Review of the Literature and Implications for Educating Teachers. Applied Development Psychology. 495- 526. http://academic.sun.ac.za/mathed/174/NatureNurture/ChildDevelopmentAndTeaching.p f
Lauberte, I., Ginters, E. & Cirulis, A. (2006). Temperament identification Methods and Simulation. Proceedings of the 11th WSEAS International Conference on Automatic Control, Modeling and simulation. 489- 500. http://www.wseas.us/e library/conferences/2009/istanbul/ACMOS/ACMOS-75.pdf
Miscisin, M. Showing. (2001) Our True colors: A Fun, Easy Guide for Understanding and Appreciating Yourself and Others. Santa Ana: True Colors, Incorporated Publishing.
Richardson, R. C. & Arker, Emily. (2010). Personalities in The classroom: Making the most of Them. Kappa Delta Pi Record. 76-81. http://www.roe11.k12.il.us/GES%20Stuff/Day%203/Personalities%20in%20the%20Cla sroom.pdf
Schaie, W. K. (1966). On The Relation of Color and Personality: Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment. Vol. 30, Issue 6. P 511- 524. http://www.uwpsychiatry.org/sls/Relation%20of%20Color%20and%20Personality.schai .1966.pdf
More sources concerning the teaching of Spanish.
Adler, J. B. Teaching Mathematics in a Multilingual Classrooms. New York: Springer. 2001
Freeman, D. E. & Freeman S. Y. Teaching Reading in Multilingual Classroom. London: Heinemann Educ. Books. 2000
Garcia, E. Technology Integration for Teaching and Learning Spanish in Elementary School. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. 2006
Maysky, M. Creative Activities for Young Children. Belmont: Cengage Learning. 2010
