2.5 Role of the Teacher
Teachers play a pivotal role in children’s active construction of knowledge. They intentionally provide the environments and experiences that support children in actively building concepts and skills. The role of the teacher who works with young children birth to age five is to support children’s active construction of knowledge. In a sense, early childhood teachers serve as research supports as the children sense, discover, and construct meaning about the world around them. Young children’s natural impulse to learn by investigating (1) what things are like and what they can make them do, and (2) how people create and share meaning shapes the role of the early childhood teacher. The early childhood teacher is responsible for: offering children well-stocked play spaces where they can construct concepts and ideas, preferably in the company of friendly peers; designing daily routines that invite children to be active participants and to use emerging skills and concepts; supporting children’s learning through interactions and conversations that prompt using language and ideas in new ways and that promote sharing meaning with others.
In carrying out those responsibilities, teachers create contexts in which young children can:
- Wonder about what things are like and what they do
- Investigate a variety of ways of relating one thing to another
- Invent problems and solutions with others; construct, transform, and represent with the materials at hand
- Create and share meaning, and collaborate in learning
- Try new challenges and practice emerging skills
- Express their emotions, feel secure to explore, and regulate their emotions and behavior
- Manage conflicts in ways that support the development of social skill
- Advocating for one’s own needs, safety, and feelings
- Learning how to connect with their peers in mutually beneficial ways
- Learning how to walk away or disengage from their peers when they feel the need to
- Learning how to cope with feelings of rejection or exclusion. And in turn, learning how to seek out positive relationships, rather than dwelling on unsatisfying ones.
Early childhood teachers see and support children as scientists and thus design the play environment to serve the children’s inquisitive minds. Teachers also provide the materials children need to construct concepts and ideas and master skills in the natural context of play. Children learn from opportunities to discover materials that they may be seeing for the first time and need time to explore and get to know the properties of these materials. It means offering children materials that they can organize into relationships of size, shape, number, or function and time. Children can investigate what happens when they put these materials together or arrange them in new ways, experiencing the delight of discovering possibilities for building with them, transforming them, or using them to represent an experience.
Early childhood teachers also design th