Psychological Analysis of Competencies in the Structure of Teacher Professional Training

Abstract

Introduction. The continuous updating of pedagogical educational standards impacts the shifts in ideas about the results of training of future teachers. The use of a competency-based approach for this purpose is accompanied by the structuring of the planned results on the basis of general and specific competencies, which formally corresponds to the real structure of pedagogical activity. The purpose of the study is to determine the psychologically substantiated structure of pedagogical competencies, correlated with the subject and psychological level of analysis of the teacher’s activity. Materials and Methods. The study used groups of methods. In order to study the history and the current state of the problem of pedagogical competencies, an analysis of studies on the structure of pedagogical abilities, the psychological structure of the teacher’s activity was used. The substantiation of the demand for a competency-based approach to teacher training was carried out in the course of a comparative analysis of academic performance in subjects and assessments of the formation of competencies of students studying in the direction of “Pedagogical Education”. The sample size was 228 people, including 38 students of the 1st year, 47 students of the 2nd year, 46 students of the 3rd year, 52 students of the 4th year, 45 students of the 5th year. Statistical data processing was carried out using methods of primary descriptive statistics, comparison methods and correlation analysis. Results. During the analysis of the history of development of ideas about the structure of pedagogical activity it was found out that the classifications of pedagogical skills are mainly analytical in nature, reflect individual aspects of pedagogical work and do not reflect the real structure of teacher’s activity. For the modern classification of the results of professional training of a teacher also formal grounds for identification of general and special competences are used. However, in order to substantiate the relevance of the competency-based approach to teaching, the authors propose to use the competency-based structure of pedagogical work based on the ideas of V.D. Shadrikov about the psychological functional system of activity. The advantages of the competence-based structure of teaching over the subject-based one are substantiated not only by the fact that the former corresponds to the real structure of the teacher’s activity, but also by a number of empirical facts: the insensitivity of the subject-based academic performance to changes in professional training (differences in academic performance by courses are statistically insignificant – p 0.05; variability of academic performance data ≤ 10%); statistical significance of differences in the formation of competencies in different courses (p ≤ 0.05); weak correlation between indicators of academic performance and development of competencies (r ≤ 0.18 at p 0.05 in each year). Discussion and Conclusion. The results of the study open opportunities for overcoming the contradiction between the competence structure of the professional training of future teachers and the psychological structure of the pedagogical activity of the teacher. The psychological structure of pedagogical competencies, classified on the basis of the content of the teacher’s activity, discussed in the article, allows us to determine the directions of experimental and empirical studies of psychological and pedagogical mechanisms and patterns of development of pedagogical competencies at the stage of professional education.