What characteristic should have a professional teacher?

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Generalizing results of theoretical researches, we came to a conclusion that professional mobility of the teacher is the integrative property of the personality uniting readiness and ability to adapt for commission of optimum actions for transformation of the educational sphere means of pedagogical activity according to the maintenance of a professional situation. Structural components of professional mobility are internal requirement to professional mobility, ability and a cognitive basis. Formations of need for professional mobility are the cornerstone development of motivation of self-education, formation of installation on self-updating and optimistic perception of reality, change of a profession, and also the self-awareness of the professional mobility by the personality created on the basis of a reflection of readiness for professional mobility. Abilities to professional mobility include the developed cognitive abilities, creativity, a divergent, criticality of thinking. The cognitive basis of professional mobility consists of general education, all-professional and professional knowledge, key qualifications and competences, ability to fast transfer of knowledge.

Sociologists allocate two main types of professional mobility – horizontal and vertical. Horizontal professional mobility is meant as transition of the individual, from one professional group in another, located at the same level in respect of payment and prestigious of a profession. Vertical professional mobility is meant as those relations which arise when moving the individual from one professional layer in another. In relation to pedagogical education vertical professional mobility is meant as readiness for advance on a career ladder from the teacher to the manager of any level in education: director of studies, director of educational institution, worker or chief of the department of education. And it is not about the careerism constructed only on unhealthy ambitions namely on continuous social and professional development of the expert when it naturally " grows" in the professional activity to its higher level, and all previous saved-up experience provides the strong base for further professional growth and development.

Horizontal professional mobility of the teacher assumes the movement on increase of professional skill (the teacher of the first category, the highest category, the winner of professional competition), and also its professional readiness to work in educational institutions of different type, state and non-state, in the conditions of the innovative and design organization of activity etc., and also, if necessary, to change of the professional sphere. The universal content of vocational training of the teacher demanded in modern society sets a task of formation of pedagogical mobility, ability to variable change of the course and the content of the pedagogical activity allowing to overcome flexibly difficulties and stamps in pedagogical situations, to carry out a choice of the most successful solution of the set pedagogical tasks, realizing thus professional experience.

Lecture 7

Theme: The geographical mobility of the teacher

The high mobility of university teachers within their country has been noted. They also move from one country to another with relative ease, so that the profession of university teaching has a cosmopolitan character unique among the professions. Most educators at this level belong to international professional organizations and tend to think of themselves as members of a worldwide profession.

Geographic mobility of teachers

For several reasons, there is less geographic mobility among primary- and secondary-school teachers. Because these teachers are licensed (whereas university teachers generally are not), they usually cannot secure a teaching job outside their own country, unless the receiving country has such a severe shortage of teachers that it seeks out immigrant teachers and gives them licenses to teach. Many African nations and India have, for this reason, a relatively large number of North American and European teachers. Language differences also interfere with geographic mobility.

Where there is a national system of state schools, as in France and England, teachers are licensed for the entire system and are able to move from one locality to another more easily than they can in countries in which there are multiple school systems organized on state or provincial lines. In the United States, where each of the 50 states has its own licensing laws and standards, teachers tend to be held within the state (though some states do have reciprocity with each other).

Stereotype of the teacher

The aphorism attributed to George Bernard Shaw, “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches, ” appears to have wide credence among intellectuals and educated groups. Primary and secondary teaching are often seen as a refuge for mediocre people who are industrious but unimaginative and uncreative. Writing in the Profession of Teaching in 1901, a Boston educator, James P. Monroe, said:

It is, indeed, the exceptional teacher—outside the faculties of colleges—who seriously looks upon himself as a professional man. The ordinary schoolmaster has little of the personal weight, of the sense of professional responsibility, of what may be called the corporate self-respect of the lawyer, the physician, or the engineer. The traditions of the teaching guild do not yet demand a wide education, a slow and laborious preparation, a careful and humble apprenticeship, such as are required for entrance into the really learned professions. A broad education and the poise of mind which follows it are the vital needs of a great majority of the public school teachers of today. They are ceaselessly complaining of a condition of things which is indeed grievous, but which is largely of their own creation. They demand high place without qualifying themselves to hold high place; they rebel at a not uncommon attitude of contempt or of contemptuous toleration on the part of the public, but do not purge themselves of the elements which excite that contempt; they accuse the parents and the public of indifference toward their work, but do little to render that work of such quality as to forbid indifference.

More than 60 years later, a professor of education at Utrecht in the Netherlands, Martinus J. Langeveld, taking a rather ambivalent position, quoted the director of a Swiss teacher-training college as saying, “The teaching profession is permeated with individuals who from youth upwards reveal the following characteristics: average drive for power, average ambition, and escapism [Lebensscheu].” Langeveld discerned an occupational type, or stereotype, characterized on the one hand by lack of independence or social courage and a limited social horizon and on the other by industriousness, intellectual interest, achievement motivation, and a love for teaching children.

Whether or not this is to be given credence, it hardly applies to university teachers, and the events of the 1960s seemed to move teachers toward much more social and political action as a group and toward greater personal initiative.

One characteristic that no longer seems to be true is that teaching is a woman’s profession. Even though most industrialized countries have a preponderance of female teachers at the primary level, there are nearly equal numbers of male and female teachers in the world. The table shows estimates of the percentage of women teachers in the late 1970s for several major countries and areas of the world.

There is a good deal of variation in the sex ratio among teachers in European countries. In 1979 the percentage of primary-school teachers who were women in the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands was 78, 65, and 46, respectively. These percentages reflect the long-standing European tradition of male teachers in the rural village schools.

Lecture 8

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