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MODERN APPROACHES TO PEDAGOGUES’ SELF-EDUCATION
T. Yu. Lomakina,
A. V. Korzhuev
This year has been declared the Year of the teacher, and we all place great hopes in the year, and deservedly hope for solutions to financial problems, above all. However, a teacher and pedagogue, despite how much financing there is, was and remains a creative person. It is creativity and a creative approach that characterizes the profession of teacher and pedagogue. Among the problems which must be solved by the pedagogical community, we would single out three.
The first problem is connected with the concept of the modern teacher: what should this person be like? This problem is also relevant today because Russia has signed the Bologna and Copenhagen conventions. We must develop a national system of qualifications and professional standards which will serve as the basis for the creation of a new generation of educational standards. One of the difficult standards will be the professional standard of the teacher. In the media, a discussion of this problem has already begun, where three approaches can be seen: (a) the teacher as a translator of their experience and knowledge, which is regulated by a state standard. (b) the teacher as a means for providing education services; (c) the teacher as a conductor, assistant and partner of the pupil in the choice of an educational path in the world of knowledge and social adaptation in interpersonal relations.
The second problem is integration of general education with other educational levels. In recent years, much attention has been given to integration of the school with universities and colleges. However, psychologists have proven that the child is most sensitive to new things up to the age of seven, so one should pay particular attention to the integration of preschool or before school education and school. A solution to this problem is being actively worked on in European Union member countries.
The third problem, without which it is impossible to solve other problems in education, is connected with the improvement of the teacher themselves. Today it is clear that information in any sphere of knowledge is significantly and fundamentally updated more than just every five or three years. So the existing system for raising qualification does not fully match the teacher’s need for knowledge. The pedagogue today must pay attention to their self-education.
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The first skills of self-instruction that are formed initially in educational institutions, which are improved in the process of higher (university) and post-graduate education, become particularly important in adult age, when a person must solve numerous important professional and social tasks that require a mastery of strategies of independent searching, an assessment of the role of influence and degree of significance of factors affecting the personality.
Fundamental changes in all spheres of life constantly modify the social order of society for education, making increasingly new demands both on its contents and forms of transmission, and methods of organization of cognitive and practical activity of pupils. In this situation, the problem of lifelong education of the teacher comes to the fore, which is increasingly transformed into self-education, making it possible to maintain a harsh "standard of compliance” to the swiftly changing realities of life. Furthermore, innovative pedagogical activity that is widespread in educational institutions involves a rejection of traditional cliches and stereotypes in the instruction, nurturing and development of the pupils’ personality. It goes beyond the bounds of existing norms, and creates new norms of the personal and creative, individual focus of the activity of the pedagogue, new pedagogical technologies which realize this activity. Here pedagogues realize themselves more profoundly as bearers of social innovations.
The adaptation aspect of professional self-improvement of the pedagogue lies in the need for professional "survival” of the teacher, their full functioning as a representative of the pedagogical community; the readiness to discover social, professional and personal perspectives.
Today there are great opportunities for realizing the activity of the personality of the pedagogue and their innovative activity. This is helped by a number of changes that have taken place in life, and are reflected in people’s thinking: the removal of restrictions in profession activity, and the decrease in preconceived, and most importantly imposed, opinions and judgments, and an increase in the flow of information. Freedom of actions and timely reacting to outer changes helps the pedagogue to acquire very important abilities, which include: readiness to react to the unexpected and make independent decisions that require risk, responsibility for them, and criticism in assessment of their own and others’ actions.
In the problem of self-education of the teacher, the idea of the Russian psychologist B. M. Teplov becomes of immense theoretical and methodological importance. This idea states that personal psychological features are not only manifested in activity, but are also created in it.
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Pedagogues working in the sphere of basic and additional education, teachers of educational institutions at various steps on the education ladder experience a need to update their professional luggage, and look for new approaches to one of the main objects of pedagogy, the study process. Expanding international contacts stimulate a flow of foreign innovations, which are included according to the situation into the Russian educational practice without the necessary scholarly analysis.
The study by M. V. Klarin has great importance for the development of the theory and practice of self-education activity of the pedagogue, which, on the basis of a theoretical analysis and characteristics of innovative searches in organizing the study process in modern western pedagogy, proposes a typology of innovative models, determines their general basis and possibilities of practical use. Of significant interest is the author’s description of the search approach to the study process on the basis of the reflexive activity of the pedagogue, which characterizes both the procedural and the contents side of instruction, and is introduced especially into the contents mastered.
The search approach is realized in developing such procedurally oriented models which are directed towards pedagogues mastering independently constructed new experience, in the form of a model of the study process as an organization: systematic research activity of pupils; game-playing, simulation activity; communicative and dialog activity, active experience of opinions, creative discussion etc.
An analysis of the literature (V. A. Slastenin, M. M. Levina, A.V. Mudrik, M. V. Vilenskey etc.) enabled us to single out the following approaches to the organization of higher pedagogical education and teacher-training: (a) the culturological approach provides the formation of contents of higher pedagogical education through the priority development of "human studies”; (b) the personal active approach is connected with new technological processes of instruction, which are designed to carry out the transition from the abstract formation of the personality to pedagogy of the development of the personality; (c) the semi-subjective (dialogical) approach proclaims the subjective position of the future teacher, and the attitude to the teacher as a unique personality, a personalization of professional training; (d) the individual creative approach determines the structure of interaction of the teacher and the student; (e) the acmeological approach reveals factors (inclinations, gifts, abilities, talent, family upbringing, self-promotion etc.) that make it possible to reach the heights of professional mastery.
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In the structure of self-education of the pedagogue, like N. Yu. Postalyuk we single out two components: style-forming and motivational. The following qualities may be classified as the features of the creative style of the pedagogue’s activity: the ability to see problems, independence of judgment, originality of thought, ease of association, anti-conformism of thinking, ease of generating ideas, critical thinking, ability to transfer knowledge and skills into new situations, readiness of memory.
Personal correlates of the creative style of activity are considered to be features of the emotional and will sphere of the personality: the ability to concentrate creative efforts, persistence, inclination to take sensible risks, boldness and independence in judgments, optimism, a high level of selfesteem, aspiration and need to introduce new things etc.
The main system-forming factor of professionalism of the personality, according to A. A. Derkach and N. V. Kuzmina, is the image of the sought-after result, to which the subject of activity strives towards. The need to reach this, an analysis of measures of moving towards it, and a search for the causes that assist and prevent it from being reached, form the professionalism of the personality. The result is expressed not only in material and spiritual values, but in personal transformation in the process of creating not only a subjectively, but an objectively new product. Based on this, we may assume that self-educational activity of the pedagogue forms a three-level structure, where the foundation is reflection -contemplation by the personality of its own searching and creative activity; creative-transformation activity, and co-authorship.
At a certain stage of carrying out pedagogical activity, the pedagogue gains individuality in professional activity. Certain signs of individuality can be singled out: uniqueness, integrity, being relative closed off and autonomous, impenetrable for the outside environment, being oneself, originality, activeness and creativity. In this connection, the term "creative individuality” arises. Creative individuality manifests itself as a higher characteristic of professional creativity and includes: (a) intellectual and creative initiative; (b) intellectual capabilities, width and depth of knowledge; (c) feeling for contradictions, tendency to creative doubt, ability to feel an internal creative battle; (d) hunger for information, feeling of new and unusual things in a problem, professionalism, thirst for learning.
The motivational component of self-educational activity of the teacher arises as a consequence of a state of discomfort, when their work is deprived of an element of personal self-development and creative potential, and transforms from the value that has independent personal value into a means of earning money. We examine his component in two directions:
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from the viewpoint of the place of professional motivation in (the general structure of motives) and as an assessment of the teacher’s attitude towards changes, i.e. the demand for pedagogical innovations, the receptivity to them, which determines the contents component of the creative direction of professional activity.
As the study we conducted shows, motives of self-realization occupy quite an important role in the system of motives of self-education activity of the teacher - they are noted by around 1/3 of pedagogues. If they are connected with professional pedagogical motives, then motives of selfassertion are practically ruled out, which suppress the development of pedagogical activity.
One of the important factors that enables innovative activity to be carried out, and according the self-education of the pedagogue, is the creativity of the pedagogue, which is necessary for the creation of a new outlook, program, textbook, and also for modification of these new things on the level of introduction.
References
1. Кларин М. В. Инновационные модели учебного процесса в современной зарубежной педагогике. - Автореф. дисс... докт. пед. наук. - М., 1994.
2. Ломакина Т. Ю. Современный принцип непрерывного профессионального образования. - М., 2007.
3. Попков В. А., Коржуев А. В. Рефлексивные технологии в высшем профессиональном образовании. - М.: Радуга, 2004.
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