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Child & youth professionals take on many roles in their work with children and families. Review the seven roles of child & youth educators below and reflect on which role is your strongest and which role you are excited to improve.

1. Communicator: Child and youth professionals communicate with many people throughout the day including families, children, support staff, coaches, administrators and community members. Child and youth professionals must be prepared to communicate with all of these individuals. Staff should feel comfortable engaging in conversation, sharing ideas, asking questions, seeking advice, and sharing their experiences and feedback with others. You must interact in a professional manner with families and your program team. Caregivers use their words, tone of voice, facial expressions and body language to communicate with children. You must reflect on the intentional and unintentional messages that you communicate to children and youth through your words and actions. Caregivers must carefully listen to children to determine a child’s needs and interests. Listening to children, families and co-workers can help us to communicate effectively.
2. Facilitator: Child and youth professionals support children’s learning by providing engaging activities and materials that support development and learning. By facilitating learning through engaging interactions, developmentally appropriate environments, interesting materials, and time to explore, learn, play, and interact we support children in becoming independent lifelong learners.
3. Coach: Child and youth professionals take on the role of a coach by interacting with children, encouraging them to take risks and providing them with feedback on their learning and developmental achievements. You observe children’s play and interactions, model how to work with materials, and provide feedback to improve or support their future interactions with materials, peers and adults.
4. Model: Child and youth professionals are role models for children, families, and program staff. Children learn about how to interact with others, materials, and the environment by observing your actions and behaviors. We model developmentally appropriate expectations to families through our interactions with children, how we set up the classroom environment and how we guide young children’s behavior. Child and youth professionals also model what it means to be a professional in the field when they demonstrate professionalism in their interactions with families and members of the team.
5. Storyteller: Teachers listen to stories and share stories of their own in the classroom. Sharing memories can be valuable learning experiences for children. Telling or reading stories in the classroom is one of the most effective ways for children to learn new things. It can be a vehicle to support children’s language and vocabulary development, children’s interests, to introduce new concepts, to build relationships, and to address racial, cultural, or family differences.
6. Timekeeper: Caregivers have an important role in planning the schedule and managing how time is spent in the program. While routines and schedules are important for children’s development and learning, learning is constant, and we shouldn’t see children’s learning as being limited to certain times of the day. A key lesson is that the role of the keeper of time is useful for children’s routines but should not be used to limit children’s time for learning.
7. Researcher: The role of the teacher as a researcher is important in supporting children’s development and learning as well as continuous quality improvement. Child and youth professionals must constantly research information in order to enhance their knowledge of child development and best practices in the field. You must also use your own reflections and observations of the children and program to inform and improve your practice. You collect feedback and observational data from families, children, informal and formal assessments, and program tools and use the information to improve the learning environment and your own practices.

Adapted from Miels, J. 2005. The Seven Faces of the Early Childhood Educator.