Abstract

Students are the nation’s asset or natural resources who need to be educated to achieve their optimal level of development. They need to be properly nurtured to allow holistic development in all domains namely; physical, mental, social, emotional, and spiritual. This is crucial for the building of a strong and respectful nation and its civilization. Teachers are entrusted to educate students. Educating is more than just mere teaching. It is necessary for teachers to possess good characters to be supportive and accommodative of their students’ learning needs, and to nurture students’ intra and interpersonal skills the crucial elements in developing gifts into talent as proposed by the Differentiated Model of Talent Development (DMGT). This paper discusses teachers’ characteristics and the underlying character strengths. Character strengths are positive psychological ingredients, which influence thinking, feeling, and behaving. A qualitative survey was carried out via face book social network, to capture respondents’ reflections on their teachers’ characters that have affected them positively. The respondents were university students and graduates from many different fields of studies. They were from prestigious schools where only academically talented students were selected to enroll. They were invited to response to this posting; “Dear friends, please feed me with some data from your own reflection. What teachers’ characters have affected you positively? Thank you for sharing”. Thirty one people had responded to the posting. Their responses were analyzed to identify themes that described their teachers’ characters, which had affected them positively. Three most frequent character strengths identified by the respondents were; wisdom and knowledge, humanity, and transcendence.

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