Idealism versus realism in student and practitioner attitude toward teaching

Abstract

© Author(s).It is absolutely essential in any professional environment to go through natural age-related rotation over a period of time. But, unfortunately, many young teachers filling in the vacancies are practically incompetent in their job, though they are supposed to have acquired certain psychological and pedagogic competencies at the university. This factor raised the issue of discrepancy between the student’s idealism with respect to future profession understanding and professional realism revealing and demonstrating young teacher’s insufficient competencies. The paper considers idealistic versus realistic set of necessary competencies for a modern teacher as the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of teaching is closely linked, and often dependent, on it. The major methods used in the study of the issue were questionnaires and interviews among school head masters/principles, teaching methodology experts, teachers and undergraduates. They allowed to determine the desired and imperative competencies for teachers. The experiment involved 230 students and 190 school representatives. Current problems in teacher education, related to Russia, have been identified as belonging to three levels: regional, teacher training institutions, and secondary schools. The study contributed to develop a csompetency model of a modern teacher and the algorithm of its development. Investigation into the idealistic understanding of certain competencies and their relevancy by the university undergraduates who participated in the assessment of competencies significance, revealed the following student's attitude: they believe that subject content knowledge and methodological competencies are number ones in their future job. There are a large number of instructional and related activities to be performed by the teacher inside and outside the classroom. In their opinion the educational competency associated with developing a child's personality, talents and etc., was the second in order of importance, whereas in real teaching practice this competency was determined as the first in order of importance followed by reflective competency, and the third place was given to subject and methodical competencies.