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Temperament in the classroom: Helping each

child find a good fit

By Barbara Keogh, Ph. D.

A childs temperament is her/his style of behavior. Temperament is biologically based, apparent early
in life, and characteristic of individuals over time and in different situations. Differences in temperament can
and do affect the way a child gets along within their family and/or at school. There are eight of nine
dimensions identified by psychiatrists Alexander Thomas & Stella Chess (1977) that are directly relevant to
the interactions between students and teachers and contribute to students adjustment in school.

Sensory threshold
Activity level
Intensity
Adaptability
Mood
Approach/withdrawal
Persistence
Distractibility

There are three main categories of temperament.

Easy children
o adaptable,
o positive
o interested in new experiences
o get along well with others
o outgoing
o friendly.
Slow-to-warm-up children
o characteristically withdrawn
o negative when faced with new situations and new people
o initially slow to adapt to change but, given time they adapt well
Difficult children
o tend to be intense
o low in adaptability
o negative in mood
o negative in their response to newness

Adaptability is crucial to a childs education. During any given classroom task, a child must become
focused in both energy and attention, take and follow specific directions (that change with each activity), resist
distraction, and persist despite challenges such as a long or boring task or one that is too easy or presents
difficulty. The author of this article conducted a study at UCLA in 2003 that looked at task orientation, which
relates to activity level, distractibility and persistence.
The findings of the study confirmed that children who achieve had better control or command over
those particular dimensions of temperament. Teachers often categorize children by temperament but skew
their opinion or perspective of children who are not easy in temperament or task oriented because those
children are more difficult to reach and teach and require more time and attention from their teachers.

But teachers bring their own, unique temperament into the classroom, which affects and sets the tone
and pace of the environment. Often this poses no problem, but when it does and there is a clash between
temperaments of a child/children and their teacher, everyone involved can quickly become frustrated or
unhappy, and the classroom environment suffers as a result.
So understanding the temperaments of the children in your classroom becomes key. A child who is
slow-to-warm up in a fast-paced and highly active environment or an intense and difficult child in a strictly
quiet and controlled environment are going to have a very different experience than those more readily
adaptable or for whom the environment is a more natural fit. There are a lot of new variables in a new
classroom environment when a childs primary environment is the home.
Temperament applies to all children, even those with a learning disability, an attention disorder, or
other special needs. The article points out that these factors and temperament can be confusing to parse out,
which often causes a teacher to be unsure how to tackle the challenge. Dr. Koegh writes,
The important thing is to sort out which behaviors are related to temperament and which
behaviors are indications of a learning disability or attention problem. Because the reasons for
each child's behavior may be different LD, AD/HD, or temperament the response to each
child's behavior must be different. When a problem with learning is caused by a learning
disability such as dyslexia, it requires specialized and intense teaching strategies over time.
However, many achievement and adjustment problems in school are the result of a poor fit
between a child's temperament and his school situation, and such problems often respond to
relatively simple changes in the instructional program and classroom.
Further confusion comes because characteristics of some disabilitiessuch as attention deficit disorderscan
be extremely similar to expressions of temperament such as high activity, impulsiveness, and distractibility.
There is a lot of overlap in symptoms, behaviors, and expression. This certainly does not mean, though, that all
children categorized as difficult in temperament have attention deficit disorders, nor does it mean that all
children with a particular disorder will be of the same temperament. Dr. Koegh writes, Because the
implications for treatment differ it is important to recognize the underlying basis of the behavior.
Dr. Koeghs article focuses mostly on how parents can help their children once armed with this
knowledge about temperament, but teachers can take similar steps. She writes, Recognizing and helping
your child understand his own temperament is a place to start. A teacher can do the same to help a child
understand their own temperament, but, as the article points out, parents have had years of observation and
experience to get a grasp of a childs temperament while a teachers experience is limited to the childs time in
the classroom. This only further stresses other studies weve discussed in class that emphasize the importance
of partnership between family and teacher, home and school.