Staff

The teachers of the school, who are highly qualified, possess a clear awareness of the aims and goals to be achieved, as well as the necessary skills regarding methods, timing, procedures, and educational tools. Supporting them is a team of professionals: a psychologist, a sociologist, a social worker, a pedagogue, a pediatrician, and a dietitian. Each contributes their own professional expertise within their specific field, with a single shared objective: to provide an educational service.

“Being a preschool teacher today involves a profile of high complexity and great responsibility, and requires mastery of specific cultural, pedagogical, psychological, methodological, and teaching skills, combined with an open sensitivity and willingness to engage in an educational relationship with children.”

The teaching role is articulated in three moments: meaning, purpose, and outcome. With regard to meaning, it is enough to refer to the classics: the educational relationship is born from an emotional tone—wonder. Between teacher and pupil there is a double sense of amazement: wonder that becomes the question of why an event or an object exists. What is known is not enough for the pupil; from this arises a constellation of questions, sometimes persistent. In the teacher, wonder arises from the unexpected nature of those whys, sometimes apparently nonsensical, yet always rooted in an existential reason. The intersection of this double wonder is the secret of successful teaching: it becomes concrete because it grows through an alternation of questions and provisional answers, which in turn generate further questions.

The meaning of educating finds its foundation here, and it also has a purpose: to ensure that this chain of questions becomes a discipline of thought, and therefore of life. Ultimately, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, educational practice can be represented as the learning of a plurality of language games—games that have their own rules, which can be traced back to one another. The act of learning is equivalent to “successfully following a rule.” This applies to grammar, mathematics, foreign languages, and even to imagination itself. These whys that lie at the origin of learning do not remain unanswered if they lead to a set of rules. When this does not happen, frustration arises both in the teacher and in the pupil. Teaching requires both enthusiasm and disillusionment: enabling the learning of language games and their rules is hard work. Today, wonder has both a cognitive and an ethical impact: cognitive, because it trains one to broaden one’s perspective and to welcome new objects into one’s intellectual horizon; ethical, because it is прежде all openness to others.

If the word vocation has meaning when placed next to the noun teacher, it does so by linking meaning, purpose, and outcome.

The distinguishing traits of those who educate are:

1. Accepting one’s responsibilities and doing one’s job every day to the best of one’s abilities.

2. Empathizing, knowing how to put oneself in the place of others (parents, pupils, other teachers, school leaders) and understanding their point of view.

3. Collaborating, knowing how to create situations of sharing and participation.

4. Being accountable: explaining, maintaining accurate documentation, showing what has been done, and being convincing and open.

5. Accepting difficulties, welcoming conflicts, failures, clashes, and fears as natural events.

6. Looking ahead, foreseeing the strategic (long-term) consequences of tactical (short-term) decisions.

7. Demonstrating competence and interest, and being able to activate skills and interests in pupils.

8. Not giving up: maintaining trust in pupils even when they struggle, believing in them even when they do not believe in themselves, and encouraging them.

9. Reflecting and fostering reflection: reading, writing, thinking, communicating problems and ideas, sharing concerns with colleagues, and cooperating with them. Teaching requires continuous reflection, looking forward to planning and backward to lived experience.

10. Admitting mistakes and correcting them: self-correction is a priority that helps one remain humble.

11. Knowing how to wait: being patient, allowing time for one’s work to take effect and for pupils to strengthen their abilities.