The Empowered and Empowering Educator

We love the ideas from The Virtues Project; we have two of their books and often refer to the pedagogy and activity ideas.

One of the key ideas is The Empowering Educator and they are described as follows…

• This person is confident, assertive, kind and enthusiastic about her role. S/he balances caring and assertiveness. S/he shows respect to the children.
• The classrooms of empowering educators have a peaceful sense of relaxed order. There is enthusiasm in both the teachers and students. There is a bond of affection between teachers and student and among students.
• The children are aware of ground rules which are known and posted on the wall and to which the educator refers to and discusses when there is a problem.
• Empowering educators call upon values to discuss conflicts or behaviour issues.
• There are always consequences when ground rules agreed upon are broken. Where possible there are choices over these consequences. As the  consequence is being acted upon, or after it, the empowered educator names the value that is expected.

We like these questions to deal with fights or other behavioural problems between two children.

• What happened? What’s happening?
• What are you feeling? What did you want by doing that?
• What do you need?
• What do they need?
• How can you make it right?
• What would be fair to both of you?