I think as an ECE (Early Childhood Educator), is very important to know how to work in a team. Since no matter where you work, either in a daycare, preschool, your own facility, you’re going to work with people and you’ll have to talk to people, and that means parents, co-workers, etc. So your classmates are very important (and so are you) when it comes to relationships. You get to have a relationship with them and learn to work with them. With all sorts of different personalities and points of views and feelings, especially us (the majority of my classmates were women), because sometimes we take things too hard.
And when we go out in the field, in this profession you have to talk to people, and it’s very important to know how to communicate. There are many group projects during the program but it’s a good way to practice all those important people skills like the very important one: open communication.
When it came to our class, we had a good relationship, and like all relationships we had our disagreements but we also learn to accept each other and became good friends. We all had different personalities and also different ages we even had male classmates and that brought a different dynamic and feeling to the class but that was very nice, different from just being all women.
When we had group projects we sometimes were able to pick our own groups but we had to have a turn to work with everybody, so everybody worked with everybody. And that to me was a good experience, because sometime like in real life, you had to work with people that you have your challenges with but at the end you work out those challenges and find success. This is actually a good practice for when you go out in the field. And the benefits of working as a group is that two or more heads together think better than one and sometimes other people have different ideas than you or things that you didn’t even thought of it, and of course you can split the work and then it’s less work for just one person.
Sometimes different people have had different experiences and they bring those experiences into the classroom and we can talk about them and learn about those experiences without having to experience those things your self.
And since you get to work with your classmates for so long, you get strong relationships and everybody brings different things to help each other. That’s other thing too, you get too have very strong relationships that you get to encourage each other and you get to help each other.
I liked all these dynamics of working together because that’s exactly what we’re going to do when we go out in the field, work with different people, that might not think like you do, that have different perspectives and different points of view and even you might work with somebody that is from a different gender, so when you go out in the field you have a little bit of more experience on that since you already practice a little bit in your own classroom.
Check out a video of Early Childhood Educators career.
