A role that will not sit still

Early childhood, this account begins, is a decisive stretch of a person's development, so the teacher's role here carries more weight than at later ages, and more responsibility with it. A teacher is someone who leads or helps in a student's learning. A role is the duty that belongs to a position: thinking and acting in a way that fits it, and carrying the responsibility the position asks. The same job, the account says, is asked to be different things as times, cultures, and philosophies of education change, and today's teacher is pulled by different hopes from many sides, so no single definition will sit still.

Even so, Biddle in 1985 is cited for three common ways of seeing a teacher's role. Some writers treat the role as the behavior that can be watched in a classroom. Some treat it as a social status shared by people in the profession — how the job is seen, how people enter and leave it. Some treat it as the expectations others hold, including the teacher's own, which may be norms or preferences, and which can clash. The three, the account says, are not exclusive, and each helps in its own way.

Care and teaching held together, and why the first adult outside the home matters

A kindergarten teacher, as the job is defined here, organizes educational activities designed to help children from age three up to elementary age grow in language, body, and social skill. The role is hard to put in one phrase, because the work is so many jobs. Besides teaching and care come planning, materials, paperwork, talks with parents, snacks and meals, and sometimes cleaning the room. Unlike teachers of older grades, this role is not limited to instruction, nor only to protective management. It should be that of a knowledgeable instructor, a counselor, and a researcher. Recent studies, the account says, also stress decision-maker, facilitator, planner, and evaluator, held together with the older role of caregiver.

The importance, it argues, comes from the importance of early childhood itself. Education looks toward the future; the teacher is at the center of that investment. The early childhood teacher is the first important adult outside the home, helping development, teaching how to be with peers, and giving a child the sense of being valued — a first model of social life, and not an easy one. In work with young children the teacher's influence is greater than at later ages, because the aim is the whole child rather than the delivery of knowledge, and because parents' hopes are larger and more varied. And the teacher is more deeply woven into daily life, because the work is built around lived experience rather than around subjects. The source is fullest on the concept, on this difference, and on those reasons. Types of role promised later in the contents are not filled out in the portion used here, and

Sources

1. The concept and importance of the early childhood teacher's role, citing among others Biddle (1985) on three ways of seeing a teacher's role.

Last updated: 14 November 2026