Personal And Professional Teacher’S Development In Postgraduate Pedagogical Education: Event-Based Approach

Abstract

The article examines the problem of the readiness of the system of postgraduate pedagogical education to ensure the conditions for supporting the personal and professional growth of Russian teachers. It is proposed to consider as an indicator of such growth at the stage of postgraduate education the teacher's exit to a new level of self-understanding of himself as a professional, which is manifested in the actualization of his author's position and productive self-realization. The research methods were the analysis of information sources based on the methodology of conceptual synthesis; google-questionnaires, interview analysis and self-reports of teachers enrolled in refresher courses. The problem of the majority of postgraduate education institutions for teachers is outlined in terms of the discrepancy between the traditional approach to improving the qualifications of teachers and the possibilities for their personal and professional development. The application of the methodology of the event-based approach to accompanying the personal and professional development of the teacher is substantiated: the conceptual basis is determined, and the andragogical principles are supplemented with the principles of centralization on meaning and eventfulness. A model for the implementation of the event-based approach in postgraduate pedagogical education has been developed, including semantic, meaningful-target, organizational-practical, productive-evaluative modules. The typical effects of classes, organized from the perspective of an event-based approach to accompanying the teacher's personal and professional growth, are revealed, and comments are given to them.

Keywords: Event, event-based approach, meaning, personal and professional development of a teacher, postgraduate pedagogical education

Introduction

The professional and personal aspects of the teaching profession are closely interrelated and can reinforce or inhibit each other. The professional side includes the standards with which the teacher is associated: compliance with qualification characteristics, expectations from society. The personal side is something internal that depends on the person himself, his individual “fit” into the professional environment. In the system of factors of personal and professional development of a teacher, the emphasis, first of all, is placed on the internal motives and needs of the teacher himself in his own development and only then on external requirements for him. A teacher works with a Person - this is the specificity of the teaching profession; his main professional “tool” is his own personality. The professional result is the more successful, the more perfect this “instrument” is (Potashnik, 2009).

If the teacher himself is not in search, he is unlikely to be able to reflect on the main meanings of life together with students. Refresher courses are usually aimed at the subject content and methodological equipment of the teacher's activity and are not focused on working with the renewal of the meanings of professional activity. Relevant in the system of postgraduate pedagogical education is the event-based approach, which provides the conditions for accompanying the personal and professional growth of the teacher.

The life of a person, in its deepest essence, is a series of significant meetings that are experienced by a person as events that have given new meaning to his existence (Leontiev, 2019). Education is such a unique meeting place for the individual and society, providing the resolution of complex everyday contradictions between them (Slobodchikov, 2009). To increase the likelihood and significance of such meetings, specially designed educational situations of event community and joint activities are advisable. The inclusion of such situations in the process of postgraduate pedagogical education contributes to the personal self-determination of teachers, the formation of authorship in pedagogical work.

The idea of eventfulness, as one of the key ideas of modern sociocultural space, opposes the trend of technologization. It manifests itself in a change in didactic approaches at all levels of education, defending its original nature (Krylova, 2010). Another aspect of eventfulness affects the phenomenon of individuality, the uniqueness of education, for this is a phenomenon that may or may not happen in educational reality (Bolnov, 1999).

The variety of requirements for the teacher is increasing. Today, it is required to improve professional reliability (Osadchuk, 2008), develop his creative competence (Bryakova, 2019), reflexivity (Peters, 1991), didactic competence (Dautova et al., 2019), skills to work in a digital educational environment (Riihelainen & Crosier, 2019), use not only speech, but also silence as an educational resource (Kozhevnikova, 2019). The demand for the teacher's self-development, his constant self-improvement, is increasingly increasing, in which the system of postgraduate pedagogical education is called upon to help.

Problem Statement

The transition to student-centered education has determined the main meaning of changes in modern education. They are associated with the teacher's orientation towards setting educational goals and objectives together with students, creating and maintaining motives for learning. The teacher is required to have more original professional ideas, personal decisions, and authorship. The value-semantic attitude to the profession ultimately determines the paths of the teacher's professional and personal development (Asmolov & Guseltseva, 2019).

Strengthening the personified character of education requires revision and replacement of the models of professional teacher thinking in the process of the formation of the teacher's pedagogical self-awareness. This process is complex and includes the stages of generating and realizing a set of individual educational and philosophical positions that form an integral system of the teacher's activity (meanings, views, values, goals, approaches); awareness of personal and professional identity and acceptance of one's own position in the professional community and in society (Kozhevnikova, 2014; Makovec, 2018). To launch and support the process of personal development of a teacher, an event-based approach in the system of postgraduate pedagogical education is advisable.

Research Questions

• What is the essence of the event-based approach accompanied by the personal and professional growth of the teacher?
• What does the model for implementing the event-driven approach in the system of postgraduate pedagogical education include?
• What are the effects of the event-based approach in the aspect of the teacher's personal and professional growth?

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this article is to substantiate the conditions for the implementation of the event-based approach in the system of postgraduate pedagogical education, which creates opportunities for the personal and professional development of the teacher.

Research Methods

The method of theoretical research was a generalizing analysis of scientific literature on the problem of using the event-based approach to the organization of educational practice, in particular, in the system of postgraduate pedagogical education, and the problem of the formation of the teacher's self-awareness. The method of conceptual synthesis was used to define the concepts of “authorship”, “event”, “event-based approach”. The modeling method was used to create a model for the implementation of the event-based approach in the system of postgraduate pedagogical education.

Interviews and google questionnaires were used in a study undertaken by the Department of Pedagogy and Andragogy at the St-Petersburg Academy of In-Service Pedagogical Education to identify teachers' motives for attending refresher courses. In addition, the analysis of the results of included observation, self-reports and reflection of the participants in the complex of lessons-events, built taking into account the educational requests of teachers, was used. A total of 815 people were involved in the experiment.

Findings

The eventfulness in the educational process is unpredictable and depends on the presence of new meanings and values for the participants in educational situations. But it is the eventfulness that creates the possibility of their germination in the personal experience of the participants in the event, the manifestation of authorship by the participants. Everyday life, filled with formal actions that do not arouse self-consciousness, is opposed to an event in education. As the survey has shown, the main motive for coming to refresher courses for most teachers is the need to present the necessary certificates for the upcoming certification. 40% of the interviewed teachers came by order of the school administration. The school administration associates learning with the development opportunities of the school and the rallying of its creative team. However, many teachers do not associate this aspiration of the school administration with the world of their own educational needs.

Eventfulness is always accompanied by the intersection of meanings, values, norms of the participants and the creation of a common value-semantic space. Characteristics of an educational event are: space and time, polylogical interaction of participants, multidimensionality and ambiguity of the topic, individual/collective reflection (Ermolaeva, 2015).To translate the educational situation into an educational event, special actions of the organizer of the classes are required. However, the element of unpredictability is always present, which also needs to be taken into account.

Andragogical principles of organizing the learning process in the system of postgraduate education when applying the event-based approach should be supplemented with the principles of focusing on meaning and eventfulness. Centering on the meaning implies the inclusion of new meanings in the content of learning, the use of technologies focused on search, construction of a common or new meaning, prevention of refusal to establish meaning in the integrated semantic space of the personal experience of participants (Petrovskij, 2010). It is necessary to create special conditions for teachers to search for and construct these meanings in teaching as an open self-organizing sense-forming system. The principle of eventfulness involves the introduction of educational situations into the process and content of learning that are personally significant for the participants, debatable in relation to the value-semantic sphere of the individual, prompting to make a decision, to make a choice, providing access to the author's product.

The conceptual basis of the event-based approach is:

• the conceptual apparatus, the units of which are universals (goal, result, product, method, means, development, formation, position ...) and special terms (event, meaning, author, productive activity, meaning-generating and meaning-forming actions);
• semantics (a set of theoretical provisions that reveal the essence and meaning of the approach);
• pragmatics as a set of modeling and design rules for the implementation of the organizational andragogical potential of this approach, accompanied by the teacher's personal and professional growth.

The model of implementation of the event-based approach in postgraduate pedagogical education assumes the relationship of the following modules: semantic; content-targeted; organizational and practical; performance-evaluating.

module includes value-semantic guidelines for ensuring the personal and professional growth of learning teachers, the search and construction of personal meanings of training based on the value self-determination of the participants in training.

module is a combination of normative, discussion and semantic content spaces that ensures the personal and professional growth of teachers, the satisfaction of their educational needs. The content of training is based on the synthesis of what is proper and essential, as the coordination of the general pedagogical culture and the products of personal semantic experience of teachers, actualized in dialogues with themselves (“I – I”), with other teachers (“I – We”).

module assumes the specifics of the implementation of instrumental approaches, principles, functions, conditions, stages in the practice of training with the provision of personally significant character of this training; scientific and methodological, material and technical support of various training formats and the implementation of individual educational routes; focused on expanding the experience of intersubjective co-creation of teachers. The learning process from the standpoint of an event-based approach implies an indispensable addition to traditional academic forms with options for pedagogical workshops, organizational-activity games and pedagogical reflections, and various educational practices.

module is monitoring the quality of mastering training programs based on a combination of students' self-assessment, a set of feedback techniques, and external expertise. Personal and professional growth of a teacher occurs as a result of his participation in educational events that are addressed to the semantic spaces of the participants in the lesson-event. The teacher can reach a new level of self-understanding of himself as a professional, more fully and adequately experiencing his own internal conflicts that require resolution.

The implementation of the event-based approach required didactic forms of training sessions of design, search and research, communicative-dialogue, game types (workshops of emotional-value relations, meaning creation, cooperation, creative writing, building new knowledge, reflexive workshops).

The main mechanism for supporting the personal and professional growth of a teacher in postgraduate pedagogical education is of the model of teaching the teacher's individual style of teaching.

The analysis of observations and self-reports of the participants of the classes, organized from the position of an event-based approach to accompanying the teacher's personal and professional growth, made it possible to identify typical effects:

• there were changes in the value-semantic sphere of teachers;
• teachers managed to formulate a modern understanding of their own profession and at the same time identify problems in their own teaching activities and comprehend them as a resource for their own development;
• it was possible in the learning process to bring teachers into the position of value-semantic comprehension; these situations acted as markers of professional self-determination and self-development;
• creative groups and informal pedagogical communities arose, united by value and semantic foundations.

The identified effects were unequal in terms of persistence and duration over time for different participants.

Conclusion

The article substantiates the need for the implementation of the event-based approach in the system of postgraduate pedagogical education, which provides the conditions for supporting the personal and professional development of teachers. Experimental research has shown that teachers experience the greatest difficulties in addressing issues of their personal growth. Teachers demonstrate a low level of understanding of the essence of the process itself and readiness to take active steps for this. And the system of postgraduate education of teachers itself does not have sufficient conditions for effective support of personal and professional development of teachers.

So, the personal and professional growth of a teacher is a complex process that proceeds successfully when the following conditions are created:

• the teacher correlates his mission, the meaning of his life with professional activity;
• to launch regular pedagogical reflection, a process of adequate self-assessment and introspection is organized;
• the teacher thinks critically and acts creatively, while dissatisfaction with oneself does not develop into pessimism and insecurity, but becomes a source for transforming oneself;
• pedagogical and andragogical optimism is professed;
• in the purposeful meaning-making activity of the teacher, the desire to find a unique, author's style is constantly updated.

Thus, we can talk about expanding the boundaries of the theory of postgraduate education due to the more active introduction into scientific circulation of the concepts: author, author's position of the teacher, event, and meaning. Together, they provide a holistic view of the educational situation in the system of postgraduate pedagogical education and the conditions for the transformation of the concepts “event” and “meaning” into an educational tool.

To ensure this, as the leading areas of work of postgraduate pedagogical education to support the personal and professional development of teachers, it will be required:

• building up the personal skills of teachers of the postgraduate education system itself in terms of supporting the processes of self-understanding, self-determination and self-realization of teachers;
• development and implementation of “immersion” of teachers in the search for meaning in the course of pedagogical workshops, educational organizational-activity games, meta-subject game sessions;

equipping teachers with an arsenal of situational and thought-activity pedagogy.

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