Methodological Maintenance Of Future Teachers Training For The Professional Choice

Abstract

Methodological support of the preparation of future teachers for the professional choice of students should include the systematization of support for all participants in the vocational guidance process; formation of a unified information environment that provides solutions of a wide range of career-oriented tasks and development of educational and methodological support for different categories of participants in the vocational guidance system, different age’s groups of students, as well as types of educational organizations. The authors analyze the experience in providing future teachers with tools for vocational guidance work in Russia and abroad, determine theoretical and methodological approaches of this problem as well as prerequisites for the development of methodological support for the preparation of future teachers for the formation of students’ professional self-determination. They also characterize specific professional skills of educators where they manifest themselves as subjects of management, organizers, and nonspecific ones, where the teacher acts only as an institutional intermediary. The authors determine the minimum of required content for the invariant component of this methodological support as well as the priorities of designing methodological support for the preparation for future teachers for vocational guidance work; it is especially important because of the prevailing negative tradition of unsystematic, contradictory and one-sided implementation of career-oriented technologies both directly in the general education school and in general at different levels of professional orientation management.

Keywords: Professional self-determinationmethodological supportcompetence approach

Introduction

In the home science and practice, a significant experience has been accumulated in the organization of support for the readiness of young people for a professional career. However, the changes that affected the "customers" for professional orientation demonstrate that the problem of developing methodological support for preparing the future teacher for career guidance has acquired new outlines. Both objective and short-term reasons include the forced dissemination of the ideas of "early career guidance", spectacular events and competitive forms, commercially oriented attraction of clients through diagnostic, recommendatory, and entertaining technologies, programs about loyalty to corporations of potential future employees.

Problem Statement

The problems of revising the views on the role of vocational guidance in the education of young people are voiced by the representatives of the public, business, and employers' communities. In the course of growing interest in this issue, an increasing attention is paid to the problems of harmonizing educational and personnel policies, and there are obvious "points of growth" at the regional level. However, from a pedagogical point of view, a significant part of vocational guidance initiatives are unsystematic in nature due to the unpreparedness of domestic teachers to implement technologies to support professional self-determination and independent reflection of their role in choosing a path of continuing education and the structure of competences necessary to provide appropriate assistance.

Research Questions

What experience has been accumulated abroad in the countries of the former Soviet Union, how does it relate to the home tradition of providing career guidance for employees of educational organizations?

What transformations are necessary for the development of methodological support for professional self-determination in the course of the formation of professionally important initiatives, harmonization of the ideas of the competence approach with the ideas about the educational mission of the teacher, the emergence of new forms of vocational guidance in the course of changes in the "internal and external contours" of vocational guidance work?

Purpose of the Study

The aim of this study is to analyze the prerequisites for updating the national methodological support for the preparation of future teachers for the professional choice of students

Research Methods

A set of theoretical methods was used to study and analyze literature on the research topic, analyze pedagogical experience in the field of career guidance, modelling.

Findings

In the world practice, the degree of elaboration of ideas about the methodological provision of training teachers for the professional choice of their students largely depends on the general context of the inclusion of teachers in career guidance work.

The professional orientation as a systemic phenomenon has been developing for more than a hundred years. Having appeared in the USA, to date, the organizational structure of the vocational guidance system, as well as the existing model of methodological support of specialists is characterized by a high degree of decentralization there (Gracheva, Zaytseva & Lomokhova, 2012).

Coordination and methodological support of the division of employment services is realized at the state level. The importance of various kinds of councils, associations, representatives of business circles, members of communal communities has grown. A key role in providing career guidance belongs the National Career Development Association (NCDA), which develops standards for the professional activity of professional advisers, qualification and ethics standards and principles of activity, and also examines methodological and information materials, as well as normative acts (NCDA: Mission Statement, History and Purpose).

A multistage vocational guidance system was established in Canada. Work with students begins at the early school age, has various forms and continues in the specially established organizations. Depending on the schools location in small towns and rural areas, the structure of vocational guidance programs varies with the recommendations of regional labor committees consisting of representatives of local authorities, educational institutions, entrepreneurs, managers of the largest local companies. It also seems important that modern Canada use electronic tools to support individual career development plans (Individual Pathway Plans (IPPs), which allows structuring career-oriented activities (Individual Pathway Plans).

Employees of the professional career service - professional advisers and teachers, conduct practical work on vocational guidance of students in the UK. Personal profiles on career counselling and professional counselling, made by professional advisers in senior school, serve as a basis for professional recommendations. Consultants provide assistance in choosing "suitable" professions, while the organizational and methodological support of vocational guidance increasingly focuses on the variety of extracurricular activities that are relevant for independent search for ways to continue education. (National Career Service; Career One Stop).

In Germany, the organizational and methodological structure of the career guidance system is characterized by a high degree of centralization. The Institute for Employment Research of the Federal Employment Agency covers the career guidance of students in schools and partly in universities. To coordinate activities, the Institute's employees interact with representatives of educational institutions within the framework of the activities of the federal commission acting at the land level (Chistyakova, Rodichev & Sokolova, 2017).

In modern Finland, schoolchildren are consistently faced first with compulsory days "working life experience", an educational event "School as a Working Place" (schoolchildren visit administration, cleaning services, kitchens). Several days of practice in a local private or state company (the place of practice is sought on its own or with the help of the school), and, finally, at the completion of training in the main school, with extended practice of up to several weeks. Teachers and career advisers supervise these stages of work. The country has a system of courses, providing the possibility of remote counseling, preserving the results of interaction with a career adviser, tracking career-oriented activities (TET-torille -Työelämään tutustumisen kohtauspaikalle).

Thus, vocational guidance work with young people in developed Western countries is viewed as an important part of the state's social and economic policy, which is reflected in a number of international legal acts.

There are a number of specialists whose professional work needs methodological support in providing assistance in professional choice: career adviser, career coach, career coordinator, career teacher, career guide (Chistyakova, Rodichev & Sokolova, 2017).

In a number of CIS member states, a great deal of importance is attached to the methodological support of vocational guidance and the participation of specially trained educators. Thus, in Belarus a profession descriptor "Teacher-vocational scientist" was developed, training courses are organized for teachers (Professiogramma «Pedagog-proforientolog).

In the Republic of Belarus, the functional requirements for the professional guidance teacher were defined, the qualification characteristic of the position of the specialist "educator-professional orientation specialist" was developed and included in the National Classifier "Professions of workers and office employees". In addition, the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection approves its qualification characteristic for presentation of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus.

In Belarus, therefore, an attempt was made to organize the target training of specialists in vocational guidance based on teacher education, while in Russia this issue is still being solved in a fragmented manner (Ignatovich, 2015).

In our country, the problem of methodological support for the preparation of the future teacher to accompany the student in professional choice was reflected in the methodological positions of the "Concept of Professional Self-Determination of Youth", developed in 1993 by a team of the researchers from the Russian Academy of Education headed by V.A. Polyakov and S.N. Chistiakova.

For the Russian Federation, it is important to create a professional standard for the type of activity "professional orientation support of professional self-determination", the rules of the activity of a specialist in support of self-determination, the formation and development of regional training and professional development systems, and the certification system for relevant personnel. The authors consider development and implementation of a system of support for specialists in the education system responsible for the solution of vocational guidance tasks to be important as well as the creation of a system of conditions for external experts outsourcing.

When building a model for methodological support of the teacher's readiness for career guidance, the following methodological approaches should be applied: a sociocultural approach that reveals the factors influencing various social processes for the self-determination young people and the factor influences of their social and professional self-determination in social processes; a system-functional approach that allows studying the system as a part of a larger system and establish functional relationships between them; an activity approach that allows studying changes in the characteristics of the process of social and professional self-determination.

For the assessment of the results of professional self-determination it is necessary to define a certain set of "professionally important competences" or "competencies of professional self-determination" understood as the ability to apply knowledge, skills and practical experience to successfully solve certain tasks of professional self-determination, in the unity of the motivational, value, cognitive, activity-practical and personal components (Rodichev, 2006; Belousov, 2016). From the perspective of harmonizing the "pragmatics" of the competence approach and the pedagogical meanings of professional orientation, it seems very promising to try the experience of Ukrainian professional orientation specialists. They propose an original principle of building a set of basic competences in the vocational guidance system, where they pay attention to the gap between "tasks and reality", difficulties in achieving professionally significant results, identified in the State Standard of Secondary Education of Ukraine. The basis of their proposed development is the synchronization of vocational guidance competencies of all participants with the corresponding levels of the Ukrainian National Qualifications Framework and sets of career guidance competencies that are systematized according to the levels of key participants in career guidance work (Milashenko &Bogachkov, 2015).

The Ukrainian vocational specialists attempted in the language of competence to formulate to what extent and at what stage they should be formed from those whom they identified as "key participants in the vocational guidance system" (student, parents, school psychologist (or classroom leader, teacher, educator), qualified professional counsellor, administrator). They identified 10 basic competencies in the structure of professionally important competencies that are conditionally divided into three blocks: a block of information on the outside world and social values, the scope of work, the sphere of education, information about themselves, and tools (National vocational guidance platform of Ukraine).

As for the authors’ research, in the course of comprehending the components of readiness for professional self-determination in the context of a competence approach, we previously made an attempt to further their structuration into: competencies related to the alignment of the factors influencing the choice, highlighting the most significant ones; specifying options and comparing them, formulating and ranking personal limiters of choice and competence related to the specification of internal and external resources, their co-organizers and the search for ways to use these resources to overcome the constraints of choice. Readiness of the teacher for the formation of these competencies of the trainee is the essence of professional requirements for his/her career-oriented professional role.

However, this description of professionally important competencies did not take into account the tendencies associated with the increasing polarization of technocratic-manipulative and humanistic views on professional orientation, which contrasts with the formulation of the specifics of the levels of career-oriented interactions ("micro level", "inner contour" - interaction between the learner and the teacher , "Macro level", "external outline" - the organization of vocational guidance in the interaction of the educational organization and territorial professional and socio-cultural environment), requires new approaches to change the methodology for the preparation of teachers for career-oriented activities (Blinov & Sergeev, 2014).

The construction of methodological support for the preparation of future teachers for the professional choice of students should compensate the consequences of numerous "gaps" of conceptual, objective, substantive, organizational and methodological nature. The reason for such "gaps" is the diversity of institutions established to provide pedagogical support for the professional self-determination of students, and the absence of state coordination of the activities of these institutions. I.S. Sergeev and O.G. Kondratyeva identify and characterize the following "gaps" between different levels of education, since these levels themselves are sufficiently disconnected having their own systems of scientific, methodological and educational support, regulatory frameworks, training traditions, etc. Researchers note the difference between schools and universities operating in the same general paradigm of "scientific" - and professional educational organizations, which training has a practical nature; within the same professional educational organization, when working with the same student, as he/she changes his/her educational roles (Kondratyeva & Sergeev, 2015).

As a result, we found that the methodological support for the preparation of future teachers for the professional choice of students should be aimed at systematizing the support of all participants in the vocational guidance process; formation of a unified information environment that provides the solution of a wide range of career-oriented tasks; development of educational and methodological support for various categories of participants in the vocational guidance system, age groups of students, as well as types of educational organizations; ensuring continuity of vocational guidance in educational organizations. It is also necessary to improve forms and methods of psychological and pedagogical support of vocational guidance of students in conditions of continuous education; formation of a monitoring system for career guidance at various levels.

Methodological support of the preparation of future teachers for the professional choice of students should be coordinated with the realities of the territorial model of organizational and pedagogical support for the professional self-determination of students, and serve as the basis for its construction on the basis of social dialogue, inter-institutional interaction, public-private partnership.

Basing on the above-described ideas on the structure and content of the professionally important competences of the teacher and the dynamics of their changes in the coming years, we described and detailed the following components of the teacher's readiness to support the professional self-determination of students, which should be the reference points in the preparation of students of pedagogical specialties for the implementation of vocational guidance in the general education. These are the readiness for professionally significant interaction with the learner, including readiness to assist the learner in acquiring and reflexively comprehending career-oriented relevant experience, willingness to assist the learner in making the decision, in designing the vocational and educational route and working with professionally important information. In addition, we should mention the readiness to establish professionally meaningful interaction with representatives of the sociocultural environment, including an assessment of the willingness of potential collaborates to solve problems of supporting the professional self-determination of students and the state of their resources and mechanisms.

Conclusion

Basing on the identified prerequisites, it seems possible to determine the priorities for designing methodological support for the preparation of future teachers for career guidance work. It is especially important, because of the prevailing negative tradition of unsystematic, contradictory and one-sided implementation of vocational guidance technologies both directly in the general education school and in general, at different levels of professional orientation management. This component also acquires special significance due to the spread of nihilistic mentality in recent years, including, among other things, the pedagogical meanings of the formation of the subject of labor.

Acknowledgments

The work was carried out within the framework of the State Assignment of the Institute for the Strategy for the Development of Education of the Russian Academy of Education for 2017-2019 (No. 27.7091.2017 / BCh on the theme: "Theoretical and methodological foundations for the preparation of future teachers for educational and vocational guidance in the system of general and additional education").

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