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THE SPECIFICS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSULTING SUPPORT OF TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT UNDER CONTINUOUS EDUCATION
О. А. Bryleva
Educational practice shows that education is changing, but we still view it with our out-of-date background. However, according to the contents of the new Federal State Standard Educational Standard, there must be innovative, psychological and pedagogical training for teachers, which provides, in particular, the development of the competences to design and carry out varied (by their content and form) educational activities. V.V. Rubtsov considers that this is the ability to build, support and develop the activities of adults and children, to deploy true educational case studies [1]. So far the teaching staff of a higher educational establishment still acts as a transmitter of the contents of their subject: providing specific knowledge, abilities and skills. That said, teaching an instructor is often impersonal due to the impersonal (subject-object) way of knowledge transmission, which may entail distortion of their self-identity. In this case, the aims of teaching are external to his or her personality. The interacting parties - the teacher and the student - are not equal, since the aims, means, time and place of training are held by the teacher, as a representative of the educational institution, and learning motives stay on the student’s side and are the only expression of his or her freedom and protest against the teacher’s objective attitude to them.
The opinion of the teaching staff of pedagogical higher educational establishments on the essence of their teaching activities - how to train teachers -is still blurred. Nevertheless, the overall trend in modifying higher education is in the higher need for teachers’ professional and personal development, primarily, the development of their personal educational competences.
Having analyzed a number of existing definitions of the competence and competences, we, following V. Ye. Klochko, understand a competence as a person’s capability to professionally use his or her knowledge, abilities and skills to solve professional, practical and casual tasks. Competency is the level of personal competence. Therewith, professionalism in the context of the new educational paradigm, to our mind, is not a feature of the competence level, but of the way of living. This provision determines the content and essential forms and techniques of psychological and consulting support of teachers’ professional formation under continuous education. The issue of psychological and consulting support of student-teachers’ professional formation is, in our opinion, possible, provided there is compliance to the suggestions made by О. К. Tikhomirov and V. Ye. Klochko. Their studies show successful experience of pure and practical activities under the new psychological ontology - working in the value and conceptual fields of those participating in the educational process.
There is no ready-made psychological knowledge which would be adequate to the goals of consulting students. The lack of unified process theory and psychological consulting efficiency encourages researchers and practitioners to gain a generalized and clear understanding of what happens between a psychologist and the client. This experience may be interpreted in different ways.
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We would like to implement one of the possible tactics, derived from the internal scientific tendency of science development, of understanding a person, in order to introduce psychological service practices at higher educational establishment based not on practice only, but also on the available contemporary methodological and theoretical studies in psychology. Other conditions of interpersonal understanding appeared as well. This is greatly due to the continuous striving of psychology to search and evolve, and with dissatisfaction with what has already been achieved, and also due to the anthropological trend in psychology, which must anthropomorphize psychological practices. One of the main tasks of our activities is to prove that the practice of psychological consulting for students may be organized in another manner, realizing what is occurring in the human communication process, when one needs another person to give advice to help solve their issues.
The transition from the psychology of psyche to the psychology of a person identified the need of defining a new look at the practice of psychological advice, especially if a client is in a state of psychological crisis, as the client’s problems are caused by the total of the dominants of real life activities, a person’s actions here and now. The attempts to build general consulting theory (Т. А. Florensky, F. Ye. Vasilyuk, А. А. Kopyev, etc.) are based on the provisions stated by L. S. Vygotsky and М. М. Bakhtin on the psyche dialogue nature. Consulting is considered to be the expression of the client’s inner dialog within interaction with the psychologist, and thus understanding of the psychological consulting as the process carried out between the active subject and the passive object is rejected.
The model of the teacher/student teacher professional development given by
L. М. Mitina includes the central part - self-development, understood as the inner activity of a teacher/student-teacher on the quality self-transformation, selfalteration and further self-development. The main content of the model is in the fact that the experience of controversy between self and active self encourages a teacher/student teacher to search for new opportunities of self-realization, becoming aware of those personal features, activities, and communication whose development will lead to settling the controversy. The vector of the professional development of a teacher/student teacher is in creative self, which unlike empirical self of the casual self-consciousness is understood as the highest potential of the possibilities which may be discovered by a person. In other words, the basic psychological condition of creative implementation by a teacher/student teacher of their own professional aims and values in continuous education is the transition onto a higher level of development self-consciousness. In this case the point is in the controversial integrity of the reflected self, acting self and creative self, which forms and directs the pedagogical development of a student/teacher.
Psychological studies demonstrate that individual development and improvement are enabled by joint activities with other people. In order to be tightly related to another person, it is first necessary to find the link to him/her self. Therefore, students’ psychological consulting support as interaction implies that self-understanding appears in the interaction of the student’s and psychologist’s concepts. Here we should mention the “creative interaction effect” (V. Ye. Klochko), that results in individual settlement by all the subjects of the educational space of the issue of the essence of their teaching, educational and professional
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activities. In this self-definition, personal values and goals correlate not only to the psychologist’s values, as he/she leads psychological advice and support of student-teachers’ professional formation, but also re-raise and resolve the problem of professional choice of all the training participants at a higher educational establishment. Discrepancy between the limits of personal choice commitment and abilities to implement it may become the trigger to self-improvement, a deed, which “generates a personality” and is a “means of self-development” (according to V. P. Zinchenko), which opens a new stage in the development of professional consciousness of a teacher as a condition of self-development and professional self-study.
In various problem situations a psychologist assists a student/teacher in gaining a new perception, understanding the current events, in activating actual senses of what is happening, in correcting the interpretation and explanation of the existing non-productive concepts of a person regarding the world and themselves. The practice of students’ psychological advice and support at a higher pedagogical educational establishment shows that strategic aims of psychological interaction are in the field of searching for new resources, which must appear in the client’s arsenal to settle his or her problems. If a student-client overcomes difficulties nonconstructively, using the mechanisms of psychological protection, then this further fixes his or her rigid messages, value orientations regarding their personality, professional activities and communication. These models are thus not adapted to any specific situation. On the contrary, positive settlement of difficulties encourages a student to be flexible changing out-of-date self-concepts, the concepts of their work, which, in turn, ensures the transition of the student teacher onto a higher level of professional self-identification. In this case students find motivation for internally-based changes. They themselves set inner standards of the features, competences and values that become the basis for the self-professional image in the future. Later on this motivation leads to the behavior which confirms these standards and enables achieving a higher professional level.
In each life situation a person reasons, reproduces and recreates respective values. However, any failure in life affects the value and conceptual components of his or her life as well. Psychological consulting practice must not be based upon personal assistance, but the psychologist’s specific goal must be in understanding the above living space failures. This understanding is required not to fill the gaps, but to solve the existing problem together, not for the person. It is possible to change the conventional system of psychological consulting support of professional formation and development of student teachers only provided psychologists of respective services of higher educational establishments start solving “conceptual” problems in their personal consulting practice, since the subject matter of the psychological consulting support is then subject to changes (from the psychology of psyche to the psychology of a person).
Bibliography
1. Рубцов В. В. Новые стандарты общего образования и обусловленная ими
необходимость модернизации системы психолого-педагогической подготовки
педагогических кадров //Вестник практической психологии образования. - 2011 - № 4.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau
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