Gubash Oksana. The System of Advanced Teacher Training in Ukraine: Retrospective, Structural and Content Analysis

Gubash Oksana,
Senior Lecturer at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University

The System of Advanced Teacher Training in Ukraine: Retrospective, Structural and Content Analysis

The article deals with the analysis of the system of advanced teacher training for in-service teachers in Ukraine. The issue is important as the education system of the country, including the advanced training system, undergoes constant changes in order to meet modern life requirements. The paper covers historical review of the issue, reveals the core of the process of advanced teacher training, its structure and content. The approaches to form the advanced teacher training curriculum, its tasks and functions are considered.

Key words: post-graduate education, advanced teacher training, methodological training, innovative processes in education, teacher’s professional level, in-service teacher training programme, professional and personal competences.

Statement of the problem. Teacher training in Ukraine has a long history. Life conditions and the society have changed dramatically. All the time, the process of teacher training and advanced in-service teacher training was organized in various ways in order to meet the demand of a certain period of time. Reasonably, the aim of training teachers was different. It was not only to prepare educated people who would know the subject and be able to transfer knowledge to the students, but to train them to conduct the main principles of the time and implement the new system in the life of society. These days, teacher training should be focused on a new role of the teacher which is based on the modern requirements and life conditions in the country. The issue of advanced teacher training is infinite as the teacher functions shift with constant changes in educational environment. This fact makes researchers deal with the problem taking into consideration the pace of modern life, technology development, political and economic state.

Analysis of latest research and publications. Since in-service teacher education in Ukraine is the branch which requires changes and improvement, it has been the subject to investigation for many Ukrainian scholars such as N. Klokar, V. Oliynyk, N. Benderets, V. Bondar, S. Antoshchuk, L. Kalinina. They have been exploring the state of advanced in-service teacher training in Ukraine, new technology implementation and the ways of system improvement.

The aim of the article is to provide a deeper insight into the issue of the development of the system of advanced teacher training in Ukraine, carry out retrospective, structural and content analyses, and consider prospects.

Statement of the basic material of the research. The system of in-service teacher training in Ukraine dates back to the 1930's, the time of implementation of a unified model of education, introduction of the unified curricula, programmes and manuals.

Previously, in the 1920s, the function of teacher advanced training, or, in other words, ensuring the conditions for professional self-development, was carried out by the Research and Exposition Stations of the People's Committees. The Stations launched pedagogical experiments, created and tested new samples and models of pedagogical activity and a new school model. Unfortunately, due to the reduction of a broad pedagogical search in the second half of the 1930s, this model was replaced by a new one which fully met the requirements for the formation of the administrative and command system totally controlled by the government.

An analysis of the development process of the education system in the Soviet Union shows that the idea of introducing innovative processes in education is not new. Well-known scholars such as V.Bespalko [2], V. Bondar [3], V. Oliynyk [13] and others have revealed this topic in their research papers. They claimed that dramatic changes were observed in the system of public education in the early 1990's. They were presented as the reforming education processes which were carried out within the framework of economic and political reforms in Ukraine, aimed at the transition to a market economy and an open civil society on the one hand, and were connected with initiatives that came from teachers and educational teams on the other. These processes contributed to the emergence of a variety of educational programmes and institutions, new models of educational content; new pedagogical systems and new education management models suitable for modern society.

It is worth mentioning that those processes took place alongside with such a socio-political process as the formation of the “people's intelligentsia”, which was accompanied with the disappearance of the "old intelligentsia" and the arrival of young teachers, prepared by the accelerated programme.

That time, the emergence of the Institutes for Teacher Improvement played an important role in the development of methodological tools for teaching basic school subjects and allowed eliminating gaps in methodological and visual training of teachers. At the beginning of the 1990s, they were transformed into the Institutes of Advanced Teacher Training.

Ukrainian scholars find it necessary to reform the system of postgraduate teacher training [4; 5; 7; 8; 11; 12]. In their works, they identify the drawbacks of the existing system of training teachers and determine some ways to correct them. At the same time, it is stated that the introduction of new structural and functional units did not have a significant impact on the practice of the IATTs, pedagogical staff was often trained on the principles which were laid in the 1930s. Now, the content of the programmes of advanced training is based on the need to enhance the subject and methodological training of teachers, the elimination of gaps in their knowledge. The Institutions for In-Service Teacher Training (IISTT) continue performing the function of implementing a public education policy in a mass school. Organizationally, the training system was built in such a way that the IISTTs limited all the processes involved in raising the level of qualification within the area of their responsibility. Teachers and managers of educational institutions were automatically "affiliated" to the specified structure. Management of this system (in relation to a particular teacher) was carried out by strictly regulating the frequency of training and initial control.

As noted above, today there is a need for special programmes of educational support and assistance to teachers in overcoming the functional and content reduction in professional development. Taking into account that the search, innovation, design and research activities of teachers and pedagogical groups is a new component of their activities, one can conclude that the transition to new programmes and the content of education can not be a natural process.

The innovative activity of the teacher involves the use of innovative resources of the professional community for the development and implementation of programmes. These resources have already been sufficiently formed during the last decade. In particular, according to V. Oliynyk, these resources contain: ideology and philosophy of education, including: new ideas about the essence of education, focusing on the trainee’s personality through actualization of the the subject formation problems, individualization of education, personal self-realization; new ideas of the educational practice concept; new qualification skills, such as ability to work with initiatives, change of communicative competences; new professional specializations – tutoring, organization of design and research activities, new types of administration (formation of curricula and schedules), etc [10]; new management models [6]: continuously developing practice (in educational organization), support for educational initiatives, professional development management, strategic management, etc; educational projects and technologies, models of professional activity.

According to the State Classification of Professions (DK- 003:2010), the qualification of each employee is determined by their level of education and specialization. In addition, according to the Project of Regulations on Postgraduate Education in Ukraine of 2014 [13], advanced training is a systematic renewal and deepening of professional knowledge, skills and abilities in the specialty, raising intellectual and cultural levels.

According to V. Oliynyk, the very definition of the concept of "advanced training" determines the three-component structure: special, professional and humanitarian. Upgrading qualifications at least once in five years’ time is mandatory for specialists and managers, and it is a prerequisite for their further promotion, assignment, etc. The duration of advanced training is divided into long-term (from 72 to 216 hours), short-term (up to 72 hours) and course unit, the duration of which is determined by separate curricula.

The new forms of class organisation enable implementing the principle of formation of the innovation activity subject. Various activities are suggested instead of the educational nature of class organisation. These include workshops focused on updating personal professional experience; reflection seminars, which allow to restore the context of their own activities; development and conducting of educational events, cooperative teacher-children participation in educational events in which pedagogical support is being built; trainings and organization of design and research teacher activities [1].

In order to develop and launch the efficient system for raising the teacher professional level in IISTTs, they suggest separating of educational and training programs. The educational programme is considered to be not only the normative document provided by the status of an educational institution, but a scientific and methodical plan that enables creating numerous different activities. Consequently, the educational programme of advanced training should have the following characteristics:

procedural content, which includes the definition of the activities of participants of the programme (trainees and trainers);
structuring as a bank of content resources, which can be modified for different target groups, tasks and needs of customers;
the possibility of forming the individual direction of training;
a real teacher inclusion in innovation activity and possible changes in his professional activities;
development of those professional activity competencies which are not directly included in the scope of training – design and research;
focus on creating a system of support for educational initiatives of programme participants [10].

Obviously, the modern curriculum is not so much a set of training courses, but a consistent, step-by-step description of the intended result achievement, the modes of reflection when moving from one stage to another. The curriculum is a set of training courses combined with common tasks. And the main emphasis to this day was made not on the procedural, but on the content component.

The thematic content of the teaching and learning process is the preferred way of structuring the content of both higher education and advanced education programmes. The limitation of this approach means that it does not support the effective design of the organisation and management of the trainees' activities.

Thus, the advanced training programmes which are focused on professional development should move from the thematic to procedural way of design. When procedure is taken into account that means it describes not so much thematic sequence, but the sequence of teacher and students’ actions on the development of the content of education. Therefore, the activities of the participants themselves become the content of training. The system, created in a similar way, provides the opportunity for different sort of educators to improve their qualifications regardless of the initial training and the specifics of the educational institution.

They also have the opportunity of forming an individual trajectory for advanced training through the selection of the invariant and variational part, separation of the introductory, main and expert-analytical sessions. At the same time, the conditions for an optimal educational choice for a teacher are created.

The areas of professional competence development included in education programmes are adapted for a certain qualification. Each programme specifies the professional competencies which it is supposed to form and develop.

Meanwhile, the following areas of professional competence development are distinguished within the framework of the whole training system:

orientation in the functional and semantic content of professional activity;
educational choice of the participant of the programme, construction of the direction of professional development;
orientation in the conceptual bases and processes of conceptualisation of innovative practices;
the ability to transfer the model of pedagogical activity into the context of their own practice;
the ability to create educational projects, including the cololaborative activity of the students;
mastery of managerial competencies: analysis of the system and model of management of the educational institution, its environment, forms of work with the local community, strategic management of the educational institution, skills in the field of personnel management;
diagnostics of changes in education, studying the dynamics of innovation practice development;
the development of personal educational initiative.

The specifics of the teaching system designed to increase teachers’ professional level should have the following fundamental features:

focus on creating conditions for teachers’ readiness to change their own professional activities. Therefore, the content of education that will be presented in the curriculum should have an interdisciplinary character. The training programme should be directed at pedagogical action, educational practice, models and technologies of teaching activity, research and diagnostics of innovative processes";
submission of professional competences defined by additional specialisation;
ensuring the teachers’ choice of the professional competences which they consider to be important tools in solving educational problems.

Taking into account all mentioned above, the content of training should contain not only new knowledge, values and technologies, but also the definition of the position of the teacher regarding the professional activity of a methodologist, developer of educational programmes and courses, designer, researcher, manager, etc.

The need to involve teacher-trainees in the system of distance learning raises the problem of forming the motivation of training (professional self-development) before the appeal of the future subject of training to the distance learning system. For effective teaching activity in the distance learning environment, it is necessary to form a teacher's motivation to overcome the psychological barrier to mastering new education technologies. As a rule, the possibility of forming an educational influence aimed at solving this problem appears only in the process of performing certain actions by means of information and communication technologies under the direct supervision of the trainer. Therefore, it is very important to involve experts in information and communication technologies, teachers and scientists who use these technologies in the field of higher education and can demonstrate the advantages of using modern hardware in various educational events, for example, teacher conferences in August, meetings, training sessions and seminars on the dissemination of advanced educational experience, etc.

At the next stage of training, when the teacher joins the system of distance learning, the necessity to update the motivational factors which encourage the continuation of this work emerges. It leads to the need for the construction of a training course with the entire structure that can be presented to the listener at the beginning of the study. Together with the explicit description of the results of training, including prospects for obtaining a certain documentary confirmation of the level of professional training, this contributes to the formation of external motivation, awareness of the amount of educational activities that should be performed in order to master the training course.

Conclusion. An essential feature of modern teaching systems at IITTs is the launch of an individual approach which is focused on the implementation of teacher training according to an individual plan, the absence of a slowdown in the pace of learning due to the fluctuation in the teaching process connected with different learning material, as well as the ability to combine elements of traditional and self-training with appropriate forms of control. Individualization of presentation of educational material, its level of differentiation should also include individualization of reinforcement. Individualization of the training trajectory can be provided by an expediently planned training management system using appropriate modern technologies.

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Губаш О.П. Система післядипломної педагогічної освіти в Україні: ретроспективний, структурний та змістовний аналіз

У статті здійснено аналіз сучасної системи післядипломної освіти педагогічних працівників в Україні. Висвітлено історичний компонент, розкрито сутність процесу підвищення кваліфікації, його структуру та зміст. Розглянуто підходи до формування програми підвищення фахової кваліфікації вчителів та завдання, які повинні бути виконані при цьому.

Питання підвищення фахової кваліфікації педагогічних працівників актуальне з огляду на постійні зміни в системі освіти країни, зокрема і в післядипломній, відповідно до нагальних потреб суспільства. В умовах конкурентного середовища ХХІ сторіччя системи навчання в закладах післядипломної педагогічної освіти повинні розвиватись, спрямовуючи діяльність на підвищення конкурентоспроможності вітчизняних навчальних закладів на українському і світовому ринках освітніх послуг, зокрема, за рахунок зміни уявлення про свою місію й завдання.

У наш час навчання вчителів у закладах післядипломної освіти ускладнене низкою проблем і суперечностей. Як найбільш важливі виокремлено такі: невідповідність змісту навчальної літератури та знань, породжених новітньою науковою парадигмою; представлення в підручниках і навчальних посібниках змісту навчання переважно від загального до часткового без урахування того, що процес наукового пізнання використовує дедукцію як засіб конкретизації напрямів пошуку в загальному поступальному індуктивному русі; суперечність між обсягом інформації, що зростає, який потрібно подати слухачеві, та обмеженою кількістю навчального часу; необхідність урахування психофізіологічного стану слухача та його індивідуальних здібностей до навчання; відставання розвитку методики навчання як науки від розвитку галузі її застосування; територіальна відокремленість слухачів; соціальні й часові індивідуальні проблеми. Для вирішення кожної з цих проблем необхідно визначити й виконати відповідні завдання, що можливо завдяки розвитку технологій, розширення міжнародних зв’язків й обміну кращими педагогічними практиками.

Ключові слова: післядипломна освіта, підвищення фахової кваліфікації вчителів, методична підготовка, інноваційні процеси в освіті, програми підвищення фахової кваліфікації вчителів, професійні та особистісні характеристики.

Губаш О.П. Система последипломного педагогического образования в Украине: ретроспективный, структурный и содержательный анализ

В статье проанализирована современная система последипломного образования педагогических работников в Украине. Этот вопрос является актуальным, поскольку образовательная система страны, включая последипломное образование, должна постоянно меняться, чтобы соответствовать насущным потребностям общества.

Освещен исторический компонент, раскрыта сущность процесса повышения квалификации, его структура и содержание. Рассмотрены подходы к формированию программы повышения квалификации учителей и задачи, которые должны быть выполнены при этом.

Ключевые слова: последипломное образование, повышение профессиональной квалификации учителей, методическая подготовка, инновационные процессы в образовании, программы повышения профессиональной квалификации учителей, профессиональные и личностные компетенции.