Teacher’s Communicative Skills Generating ‘Subject – Subject’ Interaction

Abstract

The article introduce the results of the attempt to create psychodiagnostic tool for revealing and exploring e teachers’ personal communicative qualities determining ‘subject – subject’ professional interactions in the ‘teacher – student’ system, in particular, ‘subject inducing’ type of interaction. The methodology being discussed can act as a way to obtain sufficiently detailed information about what components of professional skills being diagnosed requires attention and development on the part of a professional interested in improving his mastery in constructive communication, aimed mostly at creating "subject-inducing " relations, which, in turn, determine the actions of the subject of activity. The results obtained indicate: firstly, that the methodology can be used to solve research and practical problems; secondly, that the reality being revealed by the created methodology can be considered not only as a professional skill and ability, but also as the personal communicative qualities of a mature, responsible person whose position in the "Others and Me" system is determined by benevolence, acceptance of responsibility for the relationship nature and real support of the interaction subject.

Keywords: Student’s personality acceptancestudent’s trust in the teacherself-confidenceteacher’s professional impact with no pressure on student

Introduction

According to the ecopsychological types of interaction (Davydov, 1986; Sunnatova et al., 2015; Panov, 2017), the subject-subject type of interaction in the "student-teacher (educational environment)" system is determined by the role position of each of its components and has three sub-types: subject-detached, subject-joint and subject-inducing.

One of the goals of the current research is to study a teacher’s communicative qualities, contributing to the creation of "subject-subject" interaction and, as characteristics of the teacher’s professional "impact" in the "subject-inducing" style, predetermining the formation of student’s activity and subjectivity.

Problem Statement

In pedagogical interaction "teacher-learners", even when the objectives of interaction are coinciding and consistent, - from a teacher's side - to teach, from a student - to learn, - nevertheless, as practice and the results of numerous studies show, authoritarian, dominant, overly cautious and similar styles of interaction obviously remains prevalent. These interaction styles generally do not contribute to the formation of students' subjectivity and their active position, particularly in educational activities.

Interaction from the standpoint of social psychology (Andreyeva, 1998), as the process of actions exchange, includes three aspects of communication creating an important condition for optimizing the joint activity of people and their relations, namely: communicative side that provides information exchange; interactive - organizing interaction, including actions exchange; and perceptual side of communication as the process of perception and knowledge of each other by communication partners, and establishing rapport on this basis.

In the studies conducted by I.V. Dubrovina (1997), A.I. Zakharova (1986), F.E. Vasylyuk (1984), analyzing significant personal qualities of teachers and psychologists providing professional success, there were mentioned such qualities as humanity, empathy and ability of non-judgemental interaction. These are the necessary conditions that ensure mutual understanding between partners in interaction.

In “teacher – student” interaction, adult participant – a teacher – is a leader responsible not only for the nature of the relations themselves, but also for the way in which these relations predetermine the student’s behavior. Moreover, attaining rapport as a certain result of interaction in “teacher – student” and, generally, “adult – child” situation is a zone of adult’s professional / personal responsibility, as it’s an adult who knows, able to and carries out interaction management. It is necessary not only to understand the feelings, desires and actions of another person, but also to be able to show empathy in relation to the subject of interaction on an effective level. This is the way supportive attitude is implemented, which, in education system, often determines the effectiveness of solving professional tasks for teacher, as well as for psychologist and social worker.

Research Questions

So, we’re going to dwell in more detail upon the following questions: what kind of teacher’s communicative qualities contribute to the formation of his subjectivity, and what forms the subject-inducing relationship as a professionally significant type of interaction with students.

Purpose of the Study

Сreation of the technique allowing to reveal communicative features of the teacher which are the basis of "subject-subject" interaction.

Research Methods

There are four characteristics put in the basis for the methodology development, and they determine the scales of the methodology being created:

«Non-judgemental acceptance of another person’s personality» - in this commonplace phrase, the idea that teacher in the process of professional interaction with the subjects of educational activity promotes personal positive transformations, was totally lost. In this case, it becomes necessary to analyze what exactly the teacher non-judgementally accepts in the student, and what becomes the "goal" of the impact to ensure the student's personal positive changes. The word “acceptance” is related to non-judgemental attitude towards the personality of interaction subject. It’s obvious that all the teacher’s practices are closely associated with the appraisal of student’s performance, including his academic successes/failures, as well as his behaviour. More than that, the student needs a mark as a feedback, which informs and orients him about his activities. The essence of the student's non-judjemental acceptance is to evaluate exclusively his actions, deeds, results of activities, intentions, but in no case his own personality. You can evaluate: "your test results are good / bad", but it is not permissible to say "you did a good / bad job on the test." Eliminating personal pronoun addressing a student, focusing on action, protects the student’s personality and ensuring unconditional acceptance of the individual, while securing the need and importance of feedback from the teacher. Thus, feedback involves the need not only for evaluation, but also for information, including a discussion of the mistakes that "led" to reducing the student’s success in completing the academic task. Obviously, any process of learning, all the more so for children, includes the possibility of mistakes, errors and inaccuracies. Thus, the activities that emanate from the subject of the activity, but in no case the Personality itself, should be the “objects” for evaluation.

«Creating trustworthy relationship within the situation of interaction» – without a sense of security, protectability, respect and trust towards the teacher or psychologist, it’s rather difficult for a student to be successful - not only in the process of education, but in the class / school life generally. Disobedience, acting up, resistance, sometimes the students’ open confrontation of students happening in the school life, as a rule, can be a reaction to the lack of trusting atmosphere.

«Creating self-confidence in the students» – this is one of the key aspects being purposefully created by a teacher in the framework of educational activities, and by a psychologist in the process of counseling or correctional work. Child’s self-confidence which forms in the process of life activities cannot be reached as the result of adults’ understanding alone. Faith in one's own strengths is not formed on the basis of praise and excellent assessments, faith is formed on the basis of a deep feeling of sincere acceptance from another person, in particular adult, which causes trust, acceptance of oneself, and, in its turn, gives rise to the possibility of awareness of one’s own strengths and abilities.

«Professional’s ability to restrain himself from interference and pressuring» - Respect towards the child’s personal freedom of choice, refusal to manipulating presuppose – to be with a child, to assist, to cooperate, to support him, especially while solving difficult life tasks.

Each scale includes 11 points indicating situations of interpersonal interactions. For example, Situation No. 1: "A person suffers and does not believe that he can overcome difficulties". Each situation is estimated by the respondent by the method of the semantic differential with 8 pairs of adjectives representing both pragmatist and emotional components. The pragmatist component of communication: behavior, aspirations, motives, for example, "inclusiveness - detachment". Emotional component: states and emotions, for example, "attraction - dislike."

Findings

Methodology approbation was implemented in several stages, with consecutive editing the wordings in the texts describing situations, adjectives / adverbs and methodology instructions on the basis of the obtained data and the results of psychometric analysis.

To prove the correctness of characteristics pairs division into the pragmatist and emotional components, a factor analysis was implemented with the professional participation. Allocated factors and resulting factor loads confirmed the correspondence of empirical and theoretical distribution of characteristics.

Further, a mathematical analysis was implemented for checking the consistency of the methodology points. As a result, the author obtained sufficiently reliable indexes indicating a high level of consistency. That allowed to check the consistency of 12 points on 3 scales (currently – 11 situations and 4 scales). For example, ‘Teacher’s ability to non-judgemental acceptance of a student” obtains 0,789 consistency index in pragmatist component and 0,730 in emotional component. “Creating trustworthy relations” – 0,779 and 0,748 consistency index correspondingly. “Creating student’s self-confidence” – 0,837 pragmatist component and 0,826 emotional component on consistency index. As we can see from the data obtained, pragmatist component indexes are always more consistent than emotional component indexes. This tendency, namely, a certain ambivalence of emotional states, is typical for all three characteristics of professional abilities.

The next step in the methodology approbation was applying it to a group of students studying psychology. The sample included 94 respondents.

Further, the reliability-consistency of the method scales was tested (Table 1 ).

The data obtained demonstrate rather high reliability rates for all measurement options (Table 2 ).

Conclusion

The results obtained indicate: firstly, that the methodology can be used to solve research and practical problems; secondly, that the reality being revealed by the created methodology can be considered not only as a professional skill and ability, but also as the personal communicative qualities of a mature, responsible person whose position in the "Others and Me" system is determined by benevolence, acceptance of responsibility for the relationship nature and real support of the interaction subject.

The obtained results on the method discussed, if comprehended and understood, help to analyze, what exactly in the way we interact with others allows us to achieve success, what, contrarily, blocks the success in dealing with people, particularly in professional sphere.

The methodology being discussed can act as a way to obtain sufficiently detailed information about what components of professional skills being diagnosed requires attention and development on the part of a professional interested in improving his mastery in constructive communication, aimed mostly at creating "subject-inducing " relations, which, in turn, determine the actions of the subject of activity.

References

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