Personal and Communicative Qualities of Teachers, Defining the Subject-Subject Interaction with Students

Abstract

The relevance of the topic under study is conditioned by the dissatisfaction of both teachers and students with their relations with each other, which primarily blocks the formation of subjectness, student activity, including that in educational activities. The purpose of the study presented in the article is to study the possibility of predetermining constructiveness of interaction between teachers and students through personal and communicative qualities of teachers. Presumably, the constructive characteristics of teachers’ self-attitude can predetermine formation of professionally significant communicative characteristics: accepting personality of others as they are (lack of personality evaluation); building trust with students; creation the feeling of confidence in one’s capabilities in another person; teacher’s ability to stop him/herself from putting pressure on another person and rejection of manipulation, which, in turn, acts as a condition that predetermines the subject-subject interaction with students. The study was carried out on a sample of teachers (n = 72) of the middle and high school level of a Moscow general education school and students in grades 7–11 (n = 402) of the same school using the author’s methodology called “Features of self-attitude”, which includes the following scales: “faith in oneself” – allowing to study the constructiveness/destructiveness of self-attitude; mindfulness; autosympathy; self-esteem; selfmanagement, and the technique called “Communicative qualities of teachers.” The results of correlation analysis using the Spearman’s coefficient confirmed the hypotheses. The obtained empirical data on the influence of the emotional component of the teacher’s self-attitude on the type of interaction with students allows us to state that there is a need for introduction of psychological support into the practice of supporting teachers’ activities. Traditionally, psychological service has been more focused on students and their parents, while personality of a teacher, who is definitely one of the most important subjects in education, does not get any proper psychological support.

Keywords

• educational environment
• subject-subject interaction
• communicative and personal qualities of teachers