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EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES UNDER CONDITIONS
OF TEACHERS’ CONTINUOUS EDUCATION N. A. Savotina
This article deals with the goals of the technological approach to continuous teachers' education, presents the demands on educational technology resources, and presents the conclusions for using educational technology in teachers' further education.
Key words: Technological approach, pedagogical technology, training technology, innovation.
A professional specialist has always faced the problem of upgrading the acquired knowledge system. The solution of the problem of the functional competence and permanent upgrade of knowledge is related to the necessity of lifelong education. Especially important in this context is the additional training of professional teachers, the quality of which determines to a great extent the character and prospects of modernization of Russian education. As has been noted by scholars, Russian society has all the features of a transition from an economy based on capital and natural resources to an economy based on knowledge. Humanity has passed to the state of a research society, living in an era of knowledge and new technologies. Thereby it is important to understand that the process of creation, dissemination and usage of personal knowledge is impossible without the ethical component, without confidential atmosphere in relations with people [2].
In this context, the function of further professional training is to make a substantial contribution to the self-development of adults, a mature personality, having professional pedagogical education, to enrich the experience of creative work, and as a rule to correct the experience of the educator in bringing up the young generation. However, until now, the priority orientation in further education is the function of educating activity without active participation of teachers themselves in the process, which adversely influences the motivation of the professional activity. The passive role of the teacher in creating his/her educational outlook, performing the function of a passive visitor of courses, rather than being active subjects of educational activity, does not favor the development of a teacher’s educational competence. Thereby the moral, legal, creative and other resources of the teacher, which can launch the mechanism of continuous professional personal development, often remain unclaimed. This adversely influences the determination of a person’s own mission in educational activity and the quality of the solution of professional tasks.
In the early 21st century, B. S. Gershunsky wrote: “One cannot fail to see that improvement of educational technologies explicitly outruns the understanding of the complex hierarchy of values and objectives of education. There is the situation when the educational process is performed for the sake of the process. But any process has a sense if we know what outcome should be gained” [1, p. 18]. The new standard of Russian education is aimed at regulation not only of the content of education and the forecasted educational results, but at obtaining
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guarantees from the government concerning the achievement of such results in a comfortable, humane information environment. Unquestionably, there is a direct dependence of the conditions of adopting educational content on the results which can be obtained in these conditions. For these reasons, further professional training of teachers shall promote the development of the teachers’ personalities as professionals, for them to achieve the summit of professionalism by growing the educationalist designers of the educational environment. The content of further training of teachers must be based on the notion of teachers as subjects, able to self-organize their climbing to the summit of their professional personal selfdevelopment through self-actualization of their educational potential (the available moral, psychophysiological, socio-cultural, creative and other resources) as a basis for formation and enrichment of professional competence and culture.
These problems seriously influence the innovative processes in the educational system. Innovation is characteristic for educational activity. Nowadays its aim is to reduce the results of postgraduate education to a harmonic correlation between social demand and individual requirements of a person, and to solve the problem of formation of a socially useful and successful personality. The educational technology must become an important indicator of the innovativeness of the educational process, its new shell, which is possible to a great extent by using educational potential to amplify the effect of education. The technologization of the educational process can enhance its efficiency, but does not necessarily do so. One of the reasons for this is the inability to model an educational situation, and to forecast the intermediate and final results of technological operations. In the competitive environment, the one who has more chances is the one able to create and implement the model (as a descriptive technological level) which to the greatest extent takes into account the requirements of the educational process participants and the expectations of social consumers. Nowadays the ability to create models is not only an important component of a teacher’s professional workmanship, but the possibility to survive in an increasingly competitive environment.
The appropriateness of the technological approach to further education is explained by the fact that socio-educational technologies implemented nowadays in the educational process belong to the process type characterized by subject-to-subject relations. The importance of such technologies is manifested by the fact that each student should have the opportunity to be a social technologist for himself and his people; to participate in implementation of socio-educational technologies on various levels, contributing to social transformations in the society and the state, and to take one’s own creative, not parasitic, stance. The technological approach requires the use of a whole wealth of different techniques. Thus, the method of design in the practice of further education of teachers may include work on projects both in the sphere of the subject technology and in the sphere of social sciences. The algorithm of such work includes the study of scientific requirements to the creator of the social project: conceptual approaches and substantiation of its importance, setting the aim and tasks, structuring the mechanism of the project implementation, planning the material and human resources, as well as time with a business plan or business reference attached, and expected results. The results of the author’s work with teachers in the system
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of further education were the projects: “Development of foreign and internal tourism as a means of enhancing patriotism”, “Acquaintance of young people with the historical and cultural traditions of Russia”, “Education in the spirit of respect to other peoples’ heritage”, “Organization of the 21st Century Citizen Civil Camp”, “Military and patriotic education in an orthodox boarding school”, “Unconventional forms of civil education in the modern school”, etc.
We received evidence that the birth of a project has not only an educational and professional value, but bears great social importance: during his work, the teacher acquires and improves the civil merits he will promote in his pupils (responsibility, honesty, justice, tolerance, dignity, clemency). The right to select a project of one’s own allows integrating the tools and methods acquired in class, to develop skills of project management, acquire practical experience in business communication, as well as study the problem profoundly, understand the interaction mechanisms of different social strata, and intensifies one’s ethical attitude towards social problems.
The range of technical means application is sufficiently wide; its clearness depends on the tasks posed before the class. But the most important requirements set toward technological means are extremely limited: (a) it is important not to let any technical means think instead of the student (even if visual materials are commented by a specialist); (b) lessons with video and audio aids shall open new opportunities for interaction between subjects and acquisition of knowledge and experience, not merely an act of fact accumulation; (c) a full-fledged discussion (political, legal, ethical) is necessary by mobilizing all the intellectual potential of the students for a tolerant attitude to different viewpoints.
Generalization of the modern experience of educational technologies implementation in further education of teachers demonstrates the following [3; 4]:
(1) the process of development of educational technologies becomes a most important trend in education, whose aim under new conditions is to develop the person’s abilities, allowing him to create a qualitatively new social environment;
(2) among the technologies practiced in modern Russia, the most promising are the models of civil education, voluntary activity, raising a socially active personality, social designing and leisure activities, environmental education and preservation of schoolchildren’s health; (3) the technologies of efficient pedagogical communication popular with teachers, technologies of pedagogical workshops and master classes, technologies of project activities, technologies of quality estimation of the professional activity, personal efficiency technologies. Among the young generation the most popular are the case technologies, web quests (work with Internet resources or projects using internet resources), geocaching, flash mob, etc.; (4) appropriate implementation of educational technologies allows mobilizing the teacher’s educational potential, increasing the cultural level of the professional’s self-cultivation, making him/her more successful and mobile both in life and in his/her career.
Thus, the most important prerequisites for the innovative development of further training are the comfort of the educational environment, development of multiple forms of participation in the innovative processes, and designing new technologies of organizational interaction between the subjects of education. The
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major outcome of such activity is a high professional and social motivation being the reference position of a citizen and a professional feature of a specialist.
Reference Literature
1. Гершунский Б. С. Гражданское общество в России: Проблемы становления и развития. Пособие для самообразования. - М.: Педагогическое общество России, 2001. - 460 с.
2. Попов В., Власов М. Миниэкономические институты производства новых знаний: Институт экономики УрО РАН, 2006.
3. [Электронный ресурс]. Режим доступа свободный:
http://sch70o.mskzapad.ru/activity/educational_program/
4. [Электронный ресурс]. Режим доступа свободный:
http://gymnasium4l.spb.ru/page/meropriyatiya
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
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