ABSTRACT
Our proposal to base teacher recruitment on professional characteristics is far from original, nor is the proposition that characteristics lie at the heart of superior performance a unique insight. Indeed Professor David McClelland, the founder of McBer & Co., first proposed that we should be testing for competence rather than for intelligence in a seminal article in 1973. At this time, McClelland and others asserted that not only did measures of academic aptitude and credentials fail to predict performance at work or success in life, they were biased against minorities, women and socio-economic status (Fallows 1999). Since then, Professor Boyatzis (The Competent Manager) and more recently Daniel Goleman (Working with Emotional Intelligence) have elaborated the tradition. Goleman states, for example, that ‘emotional competencies were found to be twice as important in contributing to excellence as pure intellect and expertise’ (Goleman 1999).
