Preschool teachers play a pivotal role in the development of the children in kindergarten, and they serve as important role models for children. The positive behaviours demonstrated by preschool teachers are determined by their positive personality traits, such as kindness, empathy, creativity, curiosity, flexibility, perseverance, and reliability. A framework widely used in positive psychology to describe the positive aspects of personality is the VIA classification of character strengths and virtues. In the VIA classification, character strengths are defined as positive personality traits that are morally valuable. The classification consists of 24 character strengths, which are subdivided into 6 virtues. The aim of the study was to investigate how preschool teachers self-identify their positive traits and how these can be linked to the character strengths from the VIA classification. Fifty-five preschool teachers took part in the study. They completed a questionnaire that included an open-ended question asking them to name their positive traits and another question asking them to rate the difficulty of this task. Participants also rated the perceived importance of each of the 24 character strengths for their pedagogical work in kindergarten. The results showed that the preschool teachers were able to name several of their positive traits, ranging from 3 to 27 per participant, with an average of 6. Qualitative analysis of the positive traits listed showed that the preschool teachers most frequently named traits related to kindness, positivity, empathy, expertise, communication skills, flexibility and willingness to work. When linking their self-reported positive traits to the character strengths from the VIA classification, we found that these traits were most often associated with the following character strengths: social intelligence, teamwork, kindness, perseverance, self-regulation, love, creativity, and zest. The participants rated fairness, love, teamwork, kindness, honesty, social intelligence, self-regulation, perseverance, gratitude and creativity as the most important character strengths for their pedagogical work in kindergarten. As the VIA classification provides a clear framework for describing positive personality traits and provides an understandable vocabulary, it is useful to consider positive personality traits in the language of character strengths to facilitate research on preschool teachers’ character strengths. It is important to study the preschool teachers’ character strengths because they determine their behaviour towards and relationships with the children in their preschool group. If they are aware of their positive traits and character strengths, they can use them more consciously and considerately, which can lead to many positive outcomes for the children.

Keywords: Character strengths, VIA classification, positive traits, preschool teachers, early childhood education.