School vacations came to an end on Monday. The end to winter freewheeling begins a new period of school routine. It depends, above all, on the teacher’s personality whether this period will be burdensome and irritating or, on the contrary, full of discoveries and merrymaking. It is time to ask the question: what kind of school teacher do we want to see today? A brilliant expert in his/her subject and a knowledge-transfer master or maybe the time requires something more than that from pedagogues? Last year, for the first time in Ukrainian history, the government adopted the President-sponsored Teacher program. This program, with effect until 2012, calls for a long series of measures to reform the system of education. One of this program’s goals is modernizing the teacher training system. Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences Mykola YEVTUKH, Secretary of the Higher School Pedagogy and Psychology Department of the Academy of Sciences, thus comments on the problem of teacher training at Ukraine’s pedagogical institutions:
“It is not difficult at all to teach a would-be instructor to conduct lessons. Conversely, far from all are able to look into a child’s heart and be human. This job is only for those who can reveal themselves, improve themselves and overcome their own shortcomings. Therefore, from now on teacher training institutions will be attaching great importance to interviewing applicants about their fitness for this kind of work.
“We once had a good tradition of pre-college teacher training. University and college instructors would go to rural areas and pick out the best pedagogically-minded school graduates for further studies. It would be a good idea to restore this kind of pre-college teacher training. To this end, it will be advisable to set up boarding- school-type secondary education institutions to train rural young people for applying to teacher training colleges. It is an open secret that the teacher’s profession is no longer prestigious today.”
“Experts believe that the teacher’s only effective instrument is his/her own personality. Clearly, this instrument should be serviceable, for otherwise he or she is unlikely to show good results...”
“Psychologists say one can pronounce ‘Good afternoon’ with 40 different intonations, thus expressing totally different feelings. The intonation with which the teacher has greeted his class shows the pupils whether their mentor is in a good or bad mood and, therefore, prompts them to grasp or to ignore the things taught. A child expects his teacher, above all, to be kindhearted, and even if the most low-achieving pupil feels this kindness, he will be able to learn something because he believes his teacher. There are so many dropouts today because at a certain moment there was probably no teacher to look to for help.”
“It is common knowledge that the main problem of ‘street kids’ is precisely their inability to overcome difficulties. They back away from even the smallest obstacles and refuse to overpower themselves. Are you calling upon us to ‘buy’ the children’s affection with our kindness?”
“Neither the teacher nor the pupil should play up to each other. But, unfortunately, some kind of toadyism does exist in schools. Sycophancy is a terrible thing. This competition for the teacher’s affection emerged somewhere in the late 80s, when universities began to take into account school-leaving certificate grades. Parents began to teach their children to ‘struggle’ for the teacher’s ‘special’ attitude to them, for example, how to better present a bouquet of flowers or what to say. Obviously, the teacher is human and he can err, so one must always take account of the conditions he/she works in. There is now the following practice in schools: the teacher expects a child to ‘apple-polish’ to him/her for a higher grade or wants parents to hire him for paid lessons — allegedly to boost the pupil’s progress. It is difficult to legally ban this kind of practice; this is the domain of moral standards.
“The greatest problem of today is that teachers feel cheated by the state, for they are unable to scrape by on their meager salary and have to search for the ways of their families’ and their own survival. But is well known that a joyless teacher cannot instill joy in children, nor can an unhappy child develop normally. What can raise the teacher’s prestige is the way the local authorities treat him and help solve his problems, such as housing, heating, free literature and periodicals, and normal working conditions in his school. This done, everything else will depend on the teacher, on whether not only the children but also their parents will believe him.”
“Can one be taught this?”
“When teacher-training institutes were converted into pedagogical and even classical universities, the curriculum saw a drastic reduction of psychology-related pedagogical subjects because the institution’s new status allowed doing so. It is the courses aimed at shaping a true teacher that were cut down. I mean such subjects as history of pedagogy, basic teaching skills, social pedagogy, while the course called ‘methods of upbringing’ was completely withdrawn from the future teachers’ curriculum. Teaching to give a lesson is the simplest ever thing, while teaching to bring up children is an intricate and painstaking art. The students who are going to do on-the-job training are very afraid of character- shaping activities, for they find this difficult. But these activities are indispensable if the teacher wants to knit children’s collectives together and give children a chance to display the talents you cannot spot during a lesson.
“The pedagogy course has been cut by half and is now 108 hours. Can a teacher be trained in this period of time? And what about on-the-job training which used to continue from the first through fifth years of study? It used to give an opportunity to translate theoretical knowledge into real life experience. This practice no longer exists. Instead, various new-fashioned subjects and new specialties are being introduced — they in fact supersede the courses indispensable for high-quality training of teachers. There also used to be a subject called ‘Introduction into the profession of teacher.’ When a student was doing this course in the first semester, he could judge whether he had enrolled into the right kind of institution. Today, this subject is not even being mentioned. Only a few of Ukraine’s teacher-training institutions try to retain the required hours of psychology-related courses. This applies to Kyiv Drahomanov National Pedagogical University, Ternopil State Pedagogical University, Kharkiv State Pedagogical University, while at Nizhyn Teacher Training University the cycle of psychology-related and pedagogical subjects accounts for more than 13%, plus on-the-job training undergone continuously from the first till the fifth year of study. You cannot possibly make a high-skilled teacher out of a student unless he communicates with children. The teacher has no right to make mistakes. This is what makes the teaching profession so difficult. Yet, unless the state works out, adopts, and approves the relevant standards for psychological and pedagogical disciplines, training a true teacher will just remain an unfulfilled desire. Without these approved standards, rectors of teacher training institutions can set the duration of these purely ‘pedagogical’ courses at their own discretion and replace them with some other special courses and new disciplines. Rectors of teacher training institutions strive to obtain the status of classical universities, forgetting about their chief purpose: training teachers to meet the requirements set by the state.
