Педагогические науки/2. Проблемы подготовки специалистов

к.п.н. Валиева Ф.И., Макеев И.А.

Санкт-Петербургский государственный политехнический университет,Россия

Stress-Coping Abilities Advancement in Senior Students of Educational Departments

Teachers and other professionals in nowadays society are finding themselves under increasing pressure. There are greater demands, more complex responsibilities, and an expanding knowledge base which is continually being upgraded. A great proportion of stress and pressure experienced by teachers come from the ongoing reforms in the system of education, which seem to focus more on the “technical” issues such as curriculum, neglecting the central role of a teacher in educational process. Thus, rapid society changes have also led to new and varied expectations of professionals, often accompanied by a sense of role ambiguity.

Professional stress and collisions are so prevalent in teaching that they have an enormous detrimental effect on the teaching-learning process, manifesting in instructors performing far below their maximum potential, regardless of how well prepared and committed they are. Accumulated stresses can force the most dedicated educator to become emotionally exhausted.

To avoid such problems, to cope with them effectively teachers need to develop skills and qualities. Individual Resistance is one of them. It provides teachers with methods to fight against nowadays stressors, to cope with conflicts and adversities. It helps to fulfil life with calmness, resolution, to become confident in future, to create close, long, intimate relationships with people. Moreover it gives teachers opportunities to deal with difficult students, which appear almost in every group. We assume that in the construct of individual resistance lies the answer to all the problems that modern teachers have to cope with.

The subject of the work is individual resistance to stress and stressors. Our main objectives were: to analyze existing research findings concerning the Resilience, Social and Emotional competence; to find out the peculiarities of individual resistance and its constituents as well as intercorrelation between mentioned constructs; to prove our hypothesis that individual resistance is a multicomponent construct with main constituents: resilience, social competence and emotional competence and that these constituents can be developed and correlate to each other.

Phenomenon of individual resistance is a complex construct consisted of a lot of constituents but we outline 3 of them as the most important. These are resilience, social and emotional competences. Hypothetically we presumed resilience, social and emotional competences strongly correlating with each other and appear to be crucial in understanding, developing and maintaining high level of individual resistance. Moreover, the constituents can be evolved. Thus it may helpful for people of all professions.

As for resilience – we outline three qualities important in our mind for teaching profession: reality focus, values, problem solving abilities. The first - a reality focus means having few illusions. It is connected with having a current awareness of the world, acknowledging tough issues. A reality focus prepares people to deal with challenges when they occur. The second quality concerns values. Resilience includes a commitment to higher principles that give meaning to work. The third element is strong problem solving abilities. Resilience includes the capacity to devise innovative solutions to problems that arise in the course of work. It is not a static state and it can be enhanced or learned at least in some measure.

Emotional competence we define as the ability to perceive, appraise and express emotions accurately and adaptively, it is based on the ability to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, the ability to access and generate feelings when they facilitate cognitive activities and adaptive actions, and ability to regulate emotions in oneself and others. Emotional competence is mostly based on Emotional intelligence. The model of EI in our interpretation consists of self-awareness, self-assessment, self-management and empathy.

Social competence is another basic multicomponent construct. It consists of a lot of constituents that in all create social competence. As well as Emotional competence, Social competence is closely connected with social intelligence. We consider the construct of social competence to have three main components: social forecasting, social consciousness and social flexibility.

This research was conducted in 2010-2011 aiming at scrutinizing the correlation of individual resistance with its constituents. A battery of 3 questionnaires was spread among 124 people. The sample of the study comprised the upper-courses students (future specialists in teaching) and some academics from state universities of Russia. To analyze the results statistical and correlation methods were used.

The questionnaires were self administered, complete instructions were provided for the respondents. Because of the sensitive nature of some items, questionnaires were completely anonymous, each being given a code number. Some questionnaires were labeled different to their original names to minimize the reactive affect of participant’s personal beliefs and expectations about some concept.

To test the hypotheses correlation and regression analysis were conducted. Descriptive statistics (means and standards deviation) were calculated. Some results of statistic analysis are represented below. The results will show the difference between the levels of resilience, emotional and social competences’ evolvement among students from various faculties, show the level of development of each construct among male and female and people who don’t have working experience and those who have.

Figure1.1. Individual Resistance Constructs among Students.

Figure1.2

Figure1.2. Individual Resistance Constructs among Teachers.

In the Figure1.1 and 1.2 the results shown by teachers and students are displayed. According to the values the results displayed by teachers are higher than those of students. The level of social competence and resilience among students is lower. Perhaps this is because teachers have a higher level life experience and know how to cope with a lot of hardships in their life whereas students are not ready. The results have shown that the level of emotional competence is higher among teachers but still the level is not normal. Maybe it was caused by the period when teachers and students were tested – they were questioned before and during the exam period, thus having emotional exhaustion.

The correlation matrix for research variables was first constructed using the Statistic software to examine the associations among the variables. The results have shown that there are a lot of correlations among them. This gives us a lot of information about the relationships between constituents of Individual Resistance. The correlation was significant at a level from 0.35 and higher.

Figure2. Correlation between Individual Resistance Constructs.

With the help of correlation analysis and statistics, we examined the strongest connections between constituents of individual resistance. After that the correlation pleiades were created which helped to show graphically the connections between constituents. With the help of pleiades we can definitely say that the correlation between resilience, emotional competence and social competence is rather strong. Equally evolving resilience, social and emotional competences teachers thus give themselves an opportunity to develop individual resistance and what is more important to sustain it at a high level. Which is crucial in today’s world.

We initiated tasks and materials based on our scientific results for special teachers training courses also hold among students. In general our tasks were oriented at resilience increasing, as well as emotional and social competences advancement. The level of resilience was increased by developing the ability of careful planning of activities according to individual peculiarities and ability to change the plan easily when something goes wrong.

Positive adaptation to different situations, creative thinking in the context of life, not allowing emotions to control one’s life and behavior and being honest with oneself are all the skills influencing teaching process and powerful methods to build emotional competence. Moreover, the ability to share emotions with friends, to understand and define emotions accurately and quickly can be of some help.

Developing the ability to look through different life situations and forecast or even predict the behavior of other people gives the opportunity to increase social competence. Flexible thinking, diversification of our knowledge broadens our mind, thus increasing social competence.

References:

1. Masten S.A, Powell JL, “A resilience framework for research, policy, and practice”, New York, 2003.

2. Валиева Ф.И. , “Профессиональное выгорание и как его преодолеть”, Санкт- Петербург,2009.