Professor, Dr.Hab. E.V. Bystritskaya
Professor, Dr.Hab. E.Y. Ilaltdinova
Associate professor, PhD R.U. Arifulina
Associate professor, PhD S.I. Aksenov
Associate professor, PhD I.V. Lebedeva
Kozma Minin Nizhny Novgorod State University (Minin University), Nizhny Novgorod

Keywords: physical education teacher, professional teachers’ education system reform, students’ self-learning system, professional performance modelling technology, job responsibilities.

Background. As things now stand, the university students' self-learning design process has never been reflexion-based and this means that it has not been filled with the personally important senses, and nothing in the process could make the students understand that the “teacher’s self-learning process is his own responsibility” [5]. Furthermore, a few authors hold to the opinion that “the key problem of the national education system formed for the last few years is that it ignores the role of a student in the educational process” [1, 6].

The national physical culture and sports sector has been increasingly in need of a professional specialist having the highest personal and professional culture and capacious contextual thinking qualities. These values and qualities are known to be fully developed only when the “student strives to be a teacher for himself (herself)” [1, 2, 4]. For success of the process, the system needs to “make a transition from the purely education concept of the process design dominated by learning driven by the preset functions, to the developmental education concept giving a due priority to self-regulated knowledge accumulation process in connection with the personality-development and self-fulfilment mechanisms offered by the professional career” [3]. Such Student’s Activity Control System (SACS) should be meta-subject in its content and designed to duly train a future teacher in his/ her professional job responsibilities in the physical culture sector, the responsibilities being adequately versatile and based on an individual educational agenda [3].

Objective of the study was to develop and implement a reflexive, semantics-focused interactive system of the physical education course students’ self-reliant activity to improve the quality of their professional background.

Methods and structure of the study. For the purposes of the study, we created an interactive developmental education environment at the Physical Education Department, the system being designed on the concepts and methods of didactic process modelling for success of the professional career. The modelling technology was designed to facilitate student’s self-identification as a specialist and personality through joining and contributing to the team communication; and give the means to master the key job responsibilities in an individualized manner by having them integrated in own professional training process.

The study program was implemented in four logically connected stages. Subject to the study were 2780 students of the bachelors’ and specialists’ training systems of the following profiles within the teacher’s training sector: Physical Education; Physical Culture and Sports; Adaptive Physical Education; and Recreation, Sport and Health Improvement Tourism – at Kozma Minin Nizhny Novgorod State Teachers’ University and some other national and CIS universities.

Study results and discussion. As has been found in the fact-finding study, the existing Student’s Activity Control System (SACS) appears to have the following key drawbacks:

– Loose interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary and meta-subject links that result in the student’s  theoretical knowledge, competences and abilities being alienated from practice in the professional consciousness and self-consciousness domains making the student unprepared to employ them in practice;

– Event-centred design of the system making no provisions to satisfy the need for a teacher’s agenda being formed and corrected in the academic educational process to help the student shape up his/ her “desirable future model” of professional career; and

– Poor efficiency of the environment-forming factors and professional competency building educational factors. 

In order to correct the above drawbacks, we drafted and tested an anthropic modelling technology to form an interactive education media for the Physical Education Department based on the professional academic interaction of teachers and students within the meta-subject practice-prioritizing modules offered as a basis for the new SACS design. It was a set of aporetic (paradoxic) questions that were used for the students’ introduction to the SACS designed on the meta-subject basis. In the context of psychological and teaching knowledge, for instance, the questions were put as follows:

1. What is better to learn for possible future use, or for specific missions?

2.Is it possible to teach a person to think correctly and what does the correct thinking ability mean in your opinion?

3. What of the following should dominate in a teaching process: pre-programmed result, creative process or a set/ intention for cooperation?

4.What is the purpose of an exam: to check knowledge or search for truth?

5. What does creativity mean: description of activity or a personal quality?

The meta-subject teaching modules were designed on the following key concepts:

1. Meta-subject teaching module is designed based on a certain thinking/ activity structure – such as knowledge, problem, sense, category etc.

2. Modules are supported by certain procedures and functionality and described by the relevant universal anthropic technologies rather than only by the integrity of objectives of the elementary teaching subjects/ disciplines and reflexive-assessment criteria (professional competences).

3.Objectives and semantics of the meta-subject modules focused on the key job responsibilities development issues imply that university teachers should be highly knowledgeable in the students’ future professional responsibilities including due knowledge of every student’s portfolio, biography and athletic track record.

The meta-subject (extensive-content) teaching modules may include, for example Problem Module; Sense Module; Accomplishment Module; Teaching Mastery Module; Professional Motivation Module etc.

Meta-subject Problem Module is designed to help students – based on the relevant theoretical and practical literature, personal educational and athletic experience – identify problems in the physical education process and model problematic situations that require their personality qualities and professional self-identification being mobilized to model the relevant teaching process and highlight the potentially problematic subjects in the knowledge base.

Meta-subject Didactic Task Module is designed to build up efficient models of the teaching process tasks for success of the student’s own teaching career viewed as an objective of the professional education process. It is the didactic process task constructed as an interactive educational situation (IES) that is the core of the module. The main purpose of the IES is to help form the values-centred world outlook in the future teachers and develop their professionally important competences and personality qualities. Students learn to make success through testing and guiding actions. Within this task-based approach, the IES structure may include the following process levels [2, 4]:

• Subject level including the conditions and requirements of the task; perceptive and mental reflexion of the situation; subject-focused technological basics of the educational modelling process for the subject cognition and transformation; inter-subject information mining with the “cross-pollination” of ideas coming from different knowledge fronts;
• Operational level including activity designs; algorithmic sets; heuristic methods and tools for decision making; thinking operations and their verbal and symbolic expressions in the process control system;
• Reflexive level including assessment actions; intentions (sets for apprehension and action models); auto-communicative actions; retroactive processes (rethinking of what has been done); and the anticipation (“looking into the future”) mechanisms; and
• Personality level including communication with the teammates and teacher; self-rating of own actions; drafting a “self-concept”; and the situation interpreting in the context of the key values.
• As required by the study objectives, the authors’ diagnostics toolkit was designed to include the following components:
• Extensive self-rating set including relevant teachers’ performance testing methods; projecting methods; mutual reflexion methods etc.;
• Effective rating complemented by the process/ dynamic rating of the teaching competence formation process results, including the acmeological curve design methods and competence-forming process monitoring – from the cognitive expectations and job responsibilities mastering results to the obtained knowledge retention test results;
• Integrated self-rating of the student’s thesaurus in every its component including personality development, creative, cognitive and communicative components; and
• Diagnostics of the departmental education environment and the degrees of the students’ engagement into the environment.
• Conclusion. The subject didactic modelling methods and tools proved the most efficient in the academic educational environment modelling process. Practical tests of interactive models of the academic educational environment gave the means to identify the following four groups of anthropic technologies most efficient in the context of the future physical education teacher’s self-identification objectives:
• Subject-focused technologies designed as required by the academic subject logic;
• Didactics-centred technologies geared to improve the efficiency of the academic educational process control;
• Personality-developing technologies giving the means to form meta-subject knowledge and values-driven agenda in students, including the interactive education methods of our own design: commented educational process situations; mutual reflexion; team portfolio; dialogue with the primary source etc.;
• Body-oriented technologies including the verbal and motor learning methods that combine cognition, movement and logical knowledge.

The study demonstrated that the process of the general didactic concepts being implemented in the interactive educational environment of the academic physical education curriculum has its specific requirements as to the individualized educational environment sensitive to each personality being created for success of the future physical education teacher.

References

1. Bystritskaya E.V., Aksenov S.I., Arifulina R.U. et al. Nauchno-tekhnologicheskie podkhody v pedagogicheskom obrazovanii [Scientific and technological approaches in teacher education]. Vestnik Mininskogo universiteta, 2014, no. 1 (5), 12 p.
2. Dmitriev S.V., Bystritskaya E.V. Antropno-deyatelnostnaya paradigma v pedagogike (Polemicheskie zametki) [Anthropic-activity paradigm in pedagogics (polemical notes)]. Teoriya i praktika fiz. kultury, 2013, no. 1, pp. 96-101.
3. Dmitriev S.V., Bystritskaya E.V., Neverkovich S.D. Soznanie, myshlenie i deyatelnost v antropnykh tehnologiyakh obrazovaniya [Consciousness, thinking and activity in anthropic education technologies]. Teoriya i praktika fiz. kultury, 2013, no. 1, p. 96.
4. Dmitriev S.V., Neverkovich S.D., Bystritskaya E.V., Voronin  D.I. Transversalnye programmy dlya sistemy obrazovaniya magistrantov v sfere fizicheskoy kul'tury. Ch. 1: docendo discimus (obuchaya drugkh, my uchimsya sami) (Transversal programs for undergraduates education system in physical education sector. Part 1: docendo discimus (teaching others, we learn ourselves). Sportivny psikholog, 2014, no. 3, pp. 15-19.
5. Dmitriev S.V., Neverkovich S.D., Bystritskaya E.V. Obrazovatelnye tekhnologii - ot logiki vzaimodeystviya k logike sotvorchestva [Educational Technologies - from logic of cooperation to logic of co-creation]. Sportivny psikholog, 2011, no. 2 (23), pp. 72-77.
6. Khutorskoy A.V. Doktrina obrazovaniya cheloveka v Rossiyskoy Federatsii [The doctrine of human education in the Russian Federation]. Moscow: Eidos; Institute for Human Education publ., 2015, 24 p.

Corresponding author: oldlady@mail.ru

Abstract

The article considers the physical education students’ self-learning system design at teacher training departments to improve the quality of their professional teaching background. A professional performance modelling technology applicable in the students’ self-learning process is considered as a formation basis for the necessary professional competences and successful career of the future physical education teacher and coach. The article considers the drawbacks of the existing academic education system that must and can be corrected by the academic education and training process modelling technology including the self-learning process being designed on a modular basis. The students’ self-learning system should be designed to include a set of the following subsystems: thesaurus meaning the conceptual and categorical framework of the subject training process; canon that includes the theoretical paradigms and ideas forming a general concept of the subject;  pantheon that means the histories of the key researchers who have made their contributions to the science; annals meaning the accounts of the pivotal events in history of the subject research discipline; programmatic control operators required for control of the whole integrity of the subject discipline; and navigator that means the guide to adjacent areas of the subject discipline.

The authors have developed and tested an athropic interactive modelling technology to form an educational environment of the physical education departments based on a professional educational interaction of the academic staff and students within the frame of intra-disciplinary practice-centred education modules that are offered as a core for the student’s activity control system (SACS) design. These intra-disciplinary (extensive-content) educational modules may include the following: Problem Module; Sense Module; Accomplishment Module; Teaching Mastery Module; Professional Motivation Module etc.