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In order to understand personality traits and their influence in your classroom, we should take a look at Trait Theory first. Trait theory is an approach to the study of human personality by categorizing certain behaviours and/or habitual patterns into different traits, which are defined as characteristics that can be inherited or adopted through experience and that are relatively stable over time. Furthermore, these personality traits can be thought of as something a person has or not, or as a dimension in which people rate somewhere across the spectrum. These theory helps explain why an extrovert is more likely to kickstart a conversation with a stranger in a bar, and why an introvert may not want to go out to one from the beginning. Likewise, students may feel encouraged to do some or any of the following inside the classroom: sharing their ideas and opinions. asking questions about the lesson being reviewed. answering open questions about themselves. getting paired up to work with a classmate. eliciting vocabulary they already know. guessing an answer from context, and sofort. Why do personality traits influence students’ learning difficulties? There are many different reasons why a student engages fully or vaguely in the classroom, and their personality traits are mostly influential in the end. So to show which traits are being taken into account and their effect in students’ interaction in the classroom, I’ll use the OCEAN acronym as described by Personality researcher Brian R. Little: Open to experience. Conscientiousness. Extroversion. Agreeableness. Neuroticism. These are called The Big Five, and they are the ones mostly used in personality research, and the ones that will be used to help determine how personality traits influence students’ learning difficulties. I will point examples of each one of them: Open to experience students will have an easier time discovering lessons through trial and error than their counterpart who'd rather wait until the teacher gives proper instruction to the lesson that is being worked on. Conscientious students will be more goal-oriented than the rest, and have an easier time organizing their schedule to fit enough time to study and get ready for their future lessons. Extroverted students not only have a higher chance of fraternizing with their classmates, but will also be more comfortable with making mistakes and correcting them with help from the rest of the class. Agreeable students will work harder to solve problems than create them, and often, they will find doing so easier by working with others or to help someone else overcome their difficulties. Neurotic students may struggle more than the rest because they will fall prey to stress and anxiety more easily when they fail to accomplish a goal, or even answer a question correctly. As mentioned before, Trait theory can take personality traits as dimensions in which people rate somewhere across the spectrum, therefore, a student can be highly open to experience, conscientious, a little extroverted, but not too agreeable nor neurotic, and another one the total opposite. This suggests that students may experience widely different learning difficulties while working on any lesson according to what their personality traits are and how big is their level on each of them. As a result, you as a teacher will find out that the more you know about your students’ personality, the higher the chance you will have of engaging them in a variety of activities throughout the lesson.
