The Effectiveness Of A Personalized Child Rearing System

Abstract

The article reveals the essence of a personalized approach to upbringing. The definition of the concept of “personalized child rearing system” is given. It is understood as one of the varieties of the systemic organization of the educational process, its system-forming factor being the person of a child with his dreams, goals, interests, needs and problems. The article considers the complex problem of identifying and analyzing the effectiveness of a personified child raising system. The authors propose a study of the effectiveness of this system in accordance with the criterion of fact, which is the scientific novelty of the research. The emphasis lies on the study of the level of the system structure formation and the manifestation of its main features (properties and qualities). The approaches to the definition of the study subjects are substantiated. Particular attention is paid to the selection and development of research methods of the effectiveness of a new kind of the child raising systemic organization. The necessity of applying a systemic approach is emphasized not only in the process of designing, creating and developing a personalized child rearing system, but also in the study, analysis and evaluation of its effectiveness.

Keywords: Criterionpersonalized child rearing systemupbringing system indicatorssystemic approacheffectiveness

Introduction

Significant changes have taken place in virtually all spheres of life of both the society and individuals in Russia over the past three decades. They affected politics, economics, culture an d education. And this, in its turn, has led to the introduction of certain adjustments to the strategy and tactics of designing the child raising process in educational institutions.

A number of studies have addressed the issues of assessing the quality of a child’s educational achievements. Bolotov ( 2018) emphasizes the need to develop various models of intra-class and intra-school assessment and the creation of tools for measuring not only subject-oriented individual student progress but also the progress in the development of various competencies.

According to Yastrebov, Pinskaya, and Kosareckij  ( 2014), in the future it will inevitably be necessary to switch to a more subtle assessment system, which allows recording the dynamics of academic performance, academic achievements and important socio-demographic information for each individual student, including their possible movements within the educational system.

Most acutely the teachers felt the lack of consistency in child-raising activities and their insufficient focus on the development of specific children (“childless pedagogy”). It is no coincidence that in the 90s of the last century a systemic approach became popular in educational organizations; its application led to the emergence of child rearing systems of educational institutions and their structural divisions.

Problem Statement

The main task of modern education is to find effective ways of involving subjects of learning in self-creation, intellectual self-development and personal self-disclosure creative processes while keeping and maintaining the conditions for all the participants’ equal dialogue in the educational process ( Somkin, 2019).

Despite the fact that there has been a long discussion in pedagogy about a personality-oriented and individual approach, “the concept of education individualization has not found either its own semantic niche or practice of translating it into vast pedagogical activity yet. Up until now, many universities continue to understand the individualization of the educational process, at best, as the profile and level differentiation of the educational-upbringing process ” ( Koldaev, 2013, p. 15).

To solve the most important educational task, namely to maximize a child’s personality self-development, Gazman ( 2013) proposes to separate the concepts of socialization and individualization, which will respectively allow to distinguish the two types of programs: a) upbringing programs in the context of introducing the younger generation to national, cultural values and normative behavior; b) programs of pedagogical support of individual development through assistance in overcoming obstacles to socially adequate and original development.

A similar point of view is reflected in Obuhova and Korepanova ( 2010), research, in which she notes that there exist two approaches to education and upbringing.

The modernist approach emphasizes that all children have some common features and characteristics, so they can be taught according to general programs applying common requirements for their development. The opposite is stated in the postmodernist approach; it is assumed that all children are different, unique, therefore there is no age norm and education should begin with the search for a unique individual approach to it. You can not "stamp" children" (p. 6-7).

Innovative processes in the field of education have determined the emergence of a personified approach as a new methodological orientation in pedagogical activity and a new educational phenomenon, called the "personified system of child raising" ( Petrash, 2019; Sidorova, 2018).

Under such personalized approach we mean orientation in the teacher’s activities, which is an interconnected set of concepts, principles and technologies of pedagogical interaction contributing to a child’s person’s holistic development. Then, a personalized upbringing system is one of the varieties of the rearing process systematic organization, which system-forming factor is a child’s persona with his/her dreams, goals, interests, needs, problems, self-development activities and life communities that contribute to the success of this process ( Stepanov, 2018). In the course of a five-year interregional study, in which scientific- methodological and practical workers of educational institutions from 12 regions of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus take part, we have been trying to give an essential characteristic of a personalized rearing system and determine principles, forms, methods, techniques and conditions for modeling and creating such a system.

At the final stage of the research activity, it has become necessary to identify the effectiveness of the personified child rearing system. It was due to the following two points: firstly, the effectiveness has always been worrying teachers as a significant aspect of their activities; secondly, this feature can be seen as a significant argument to justify the educational appropriateness of the measures taken for children’s personalized rearing system design and development.

To determine the effectiveness, criteria, indicators and research methods should be developed. If it is possible to consider a personified upbringing system to be a kind of systematic organization of the rearing process, then we can rely on the criteria designed to measure child-raising system effectiveness already existing in pedagogical theory and practice. Such criteria, according to Karakovskij ( 1989), are:

• criterion of fact, allowing to determine the presence of an upbringing system by means of the study of its basic quality formation level;

• quality criterion, which acts as a measurement of the upbringing system influence on the schoolchildren’s development and their values in particular.

The results of our research have shown that we must add one more measurement to the two existing ones - the criterion of children’s and adults’ satisfaction with the conditions and effectiveness of the child-raising system. In our study, it permits us to judge whether a child has a sense of satisfaction with his/her life, completed self-development work and its results as well as parents’, teachers’ and other adults’ satisfaction with both the process and the results of parental and pedagogical support for a child’s aspirations and efforts and the conditions designed to stimulate and implement a child’s self-development activities.

Research Questions

The criterion of fact serves to identify the authenticity of the personified child rearing system existence. Thanks to it, a scientist or a practitioner can establish whether this system is a reality or a myth. Undoubtedly, such information can be obtained if the main research subjects, indicators, techniques and methods are determined in accordance with this criterion. Answers to the following questions are required:

• Who is the most appropriate to perform the subject functions when studying the effectiveness of a personified upbringing system?

• What indicators are better to choose in this case?

• What techniques and methods can be considered as the main elements of the study tools?

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of the study is to develop and test the tools for studying the effectiveness of a personalized childrearing system in accordance with the fact criterion.

Research Methods

The main method of studying a personified upbringing system and its effectiveness used to be the system analysis. This is due to the fact that a personified system belongs to the category of system formations; therefore, its analysis should be adequate, i.e. systemic. Systemic analysis of systems, according to Konarzhevskij (1996) includes 4 aspects:

• morphological analysis, which allows to find out what elements the system consists of, what they are, what their set is;

• structural analysis, contributing to the elucidation of the system internal organization, determining the nature of the relationships of its elements, identifying system-forming connections and relationships;

• functional analysis aimed at revealing the functions of the system as a whole and its individual components, and studying the functioning mechanism of the whole system organism and its main parts;

• genetic (historical) analysis, which allows to study the system origins, formation, further development and transformation.

All respondents have been divided into three groups: students, parents and teachers.

The text of a student’s interview was aimed at identifying a child’s life goals and ongoing activities to achieve them; verifying their basic needs, interests, value orientations; clarifying self-improvement tasks, actions and results; establishing their most significant groups of people and individuals, including those who provided them with effective assistance in self-development.

When interviewing a child’s parents, an attempt was made to find out how the family space affects their son’s or daughter’s life and development, their setting and achieving life goals, the realization of their interests and needs, the choice of life values and the circle of significant people.

Interviewing teachers (class teacher, subject teacher, extracurricular activities teacher) was carried out in order to clarify the content, forms and methods of organizing pedagogical activities when designing, creating and developing a personalized child rearing system. Prior to that, teachers were recommended to fill in questionnaires and conduct testing for a deeper and more detailed study of a particular student. An important role in obtaining reliable and useful information about a child was played by individual and collective reflection techniques and methods.

Along with the structure of the system, the subject (or subjects) of study’s field of view should also include the manifestation of its main features such as integrity, purposefulness, orderliness, self-development and self-management. In our study, the listed features are regarded as indicators of the personalized upbringing system effectiveness.

When determining the subjects of the study, we assumed that assessing personified child raising system effectiveness will be more adequate if the subject role is performed by both those active in modeling, creating and functioning of the studied upbringing system, who know it from the inside (the first group), and experts, who happen to be the most competent people in the field of personified child raising, capable of analyzing and evaluating the status and effectiveness of such a system from the outside (second group).

While studying the effectiveness of a particular child rearing system the first group included: a child as a subject of self-development and other spheres of his/her life, his/her parents, a teacher-educator (class teacher or teacher at a boarding-school type institution) and another adult who was actively involved in raising a child and contributed to his/her successful development being, as a rule, the most significant (reference) person in the life of a boy or a girl. Most often such an adult was either a subject teacher, or a teacher from an institution of extracurricular education, a culture or sports industry specialist.

The second (expert) group consisted of 2-3 people (scientific-methodological expert, school counsellor, head of the child-upbringing service at the educational institution) who interviewed the child and people from his/her immediate social circle, along with processing and analyzing the results obtained using methods of studying personalized child rearing system effectiveness.

Findings

The complex of the applied research methods allowed achieving the planned results of the research activities. The main one is the achievement of the preset goal, i.e. the development and testing of tools for studying the personalized child raising system effectiveness in accordance with the criterion of fact.

The descriptions compiled during the course of our study make it possible to judge the presence or absence of a personified upbringing system in the educational interaction of teachers and other adults with specific people. The total number of the filed descriptions equals 29.

They contain fairly complete and objective information about the main components of the personified child rearing system, the relationships between them, as well as about the main characteristics of the system in question.

In this case, we are talking about the characteristics of such components as:

• Personal component (the child as a subject of self-development, individual and joint life activity; the teacher (teachers) as the subject (subjects) of educational activities aimed at facilitating the child’s development, self-realization and self-expression processes);

• Value-semantic component (dreams and targets of the child’s life, including those found in the course of self- development, pedagogical goals and tasks in raising a specific schoolchild; values and rules of the child’s activities and the process of his/her upbringing);

• Organization-and-activity component (the child’s activity in cognition and transformation of himself/herself and the surrounding world; the schoolchild’s needs, interests and desires; teachers’ and other adults’ activities aimed at assisting children in achieving their goals);

• Spatial-relational component (the child’s life and development environment, the space of educational interaction, the relationship between the participants in the upbringing process);

• Result-analytical component (criteria and indicators of the personified child rearing system effectiveness, techniques and methods for studying and analyzing the state and effectiveness of such a system) ( Stepanov & Volodina, 2019).

Obtaining this information allows us to take the following steps in studying personalized upbringing system effectiveness which is to pass on to its study in accordance with the criteria of quality and satisfaction, since some information has already been received about a few aspects of the rearing system impact on a child and the formation of the sense of satisfaction among its subjects. The compiled descriptions of the personified upbringing system are important for identifying its common, special and individual characteristics (qualities).

As an example, two brief descriptions of the 5 components comprising personalized upbringing systems can be submitted (Table 01 ).

Conclusion

Having completed the enumeration of the research results, it is possible to draw conclusions from the research activity based on them. The following points may serve as conclusions:

The information obtained when describing 29 child-rearing systems is an additional confirmation of the fact that the personified child-rearing system, which has become a pedagogical reality due to the simultaneous and conjugate use of systemic and personified approaches in the practice of upbringing schoolchildren, is one of the varieties and an important link in the systematic organization of the child rearing process in the educational institution. The systematic organization of educational activities in an educational institution involves designing and creating three types of upbringing systems: the child rearing system of the educational institution itself; the upbringing systems of the educational institution structural divisions (study groups and classes, clubs, sections, studios, extended-day groups) as well as personalized child-rearing systems.

Personalized child-rearing systems must be created not only in general education institutions, but also in institutions providing extracurricular education, since they have real opportunities to achieve targets in the children’s lives, meeting their needs and interests, organizing fascinating and useful individual and joint activities, education and child-adult co-existing community development.

The influence of a personalized upbringing system can cover virtually a child’s entire life activity and all or part of his/her developmental space, therefore, in one case, we can mark the existence of an absolutely complete personified rearing system, while, in the other, the existence of such a system in a localized space of a general educational organization or institution of extracurricular education, their structural units, when one or another type (direction) of activity is being carried out.

In order to form deep, detailed, clear and adequate ideas about the effectiveness of a personalized upbringing system, it is necessary to ensure the fulfillment of the subjective role in the study of this pedagogical phenomenon for both active participants in the modeling, creating and functioning of such a system, who know it from the inside, and experts who are able to analyze and evaluate the system status and performance.

• It is essential that effectiveness measuring tools include a wide range of techniques and methods, such as pedagogical observation, expertise of the creative activity results, interviewing, testing, and filling in questionnaires, individual and collective reflection methods.

• The tools we created allow us to study the effectiveness of a personalized education system in accordance with the fact criterion and can be later applied in the practical work of teachers.

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