Some teacher personality traits analyzed

Abstract

LATO, more than two thousand years ago, described his teacher, Socrates, by the rhetorical question, Can he who is harmoniously constructed ever be unjust? Something of this is implied today when is assumed that the successful teacher is a harmoniously constructed personality. Whereas certain aspects of a person's personality appear to be fixed and permanent, is true that other aspects can and do change with time, conditions, and experiences. Most personality traits can be altered if the individual concerned is sincere in his desire to change and puts forth both the initial energy necessary to affect the change and the subsequent persistent and often protracted efforts to give permanence. In a recent book, Schneiders (14) states emphatically that it is important to recognize that human personality has unlimited potentialities for change and for improvement. Elsewhere in the same volume he asserts that personality is a dynamic, constantly-changing phenomenon, emerging from moment to moment and from day to day out of the myriad relations between individual and environment, and changing and adjusting in response to the demands from within and without, but always bearing the stamp of self-determined individuality. Cattell (13) divides the traits that enter into the total personality in three groups: those of ability, those of temperament, and those representing the dynamic modalities. He states: By actual personality manifestation any piece of behavior expresses all three, but we may extract the ability aspect by asking how well the person is doing and the dynamic aspect by asking why he is doing it. Further he maintains that abilities are traits whose measures alter most through changes