Foundation of Education

Key Unit Competence:

Justify how knowledge of and respect for different personalities make teachers more effective.

Introductory activity

MUGENZI always quarrels with her wife and most of the time when he reaches at the job he could not answer properly to his friends. His son MANZI who is in P4 is emotionally angry and he is not happy when he is with classmates.

1. List down other characteristics that MANZI may copy from his father

2. Where does the behaviour of MANZI come from?

5.1. Key concepts of personality

Activity 5.1

Which among the following lists of characteristics are related to personality?

Individual, character, temperament, home environment, emotion, sensitive, teacher’s code of conduct, imagination, self-concept.

• Personality

Personality is a set of traits or characteristics that make all people individual. It is also an integration of traits that can be investigated and described in order to render an account of the unique quality of the individual. It is made up by many concepts most of which are going to be detailed in this topic.

• The character

It is usual and constant manner of being, feeling, acting and reacting particular to everybody in his environment. We can see easily character in social relationship. The character can be innate or acquired. It can be modified by the environment (education, life circumstances, success or failure, climate).

• Behavioural patterns

Behaviour Pattern, as referred to in psychology, refers to a set of dominant behaviours and emotional reactions that include a high emphasis of competition, impatience, hostility and aggression. These are people who are extremely intense and driven to succeed. Behaviour pattern can also be defined as a recurrent way of acting by an individual or group toward a given object or in a given situation.

• Temperament

It is the way of being, feeling, acting or reacting of everybody on his/her morphology and physiology. The temperament is fixed or permanent.

Temperament is a set of in-born traits that organize the child’s approach to the world. They are instrumental in the development of the child’s distinct personality. These traits also determine how the child goes about learning the world surrounding him/her. These traits appear to be relatively stable from birth. They are enduring characteristics that are actually never “good” or “bad.” How they are received determines whether they are perceived by the child as being a bad or good thing. When parents understand the temperament of their children, they can avoid blaming themselves for issues that are normal for their children’s temperament. Some children are noisier than other. Some are cuddlier than others. Some have more regular sleep patterns than others.

• Temperament Traits

Psychologists studying individual differences in people have identified the following nine traits as parts of temperament (Thomas et al, 1970).

• Temperament Types

i. Easy or flexible (about 40% of most groups of children)

Typically, the easy child is regular in biological rhythms, adaptable, approachable, and generally positive in mood of mild to medium intensity. Such a child is easy for caregivers. S/he is easily toilet trained, learns to sleep through the night, has regular feeding and nap routines, takes to most new situations and people pleasantly, usually adapts to change quickly, is generally cheerful and expresses her/his distress or frustration mildly. In fact, children with easy temperaments may show very deep feelings with only a single tear rolling down a check.