Technology of Conducting Group Training to Increase Communicative Competence for Teachers of Socio-Humanitarian Disciplines

Introduction

The success of teaching in colleges and universities largely depends on the quality of communicative activity of teachers. The demand for highly developed communicative skills of teachers has increased significantly due to a number of reasons: the growth of educational information, the arrangement of main training activities in dialogical, active and interactive forms, the need to organize effective individual and group work of students, which is especially important in teaching socio-humanitarian disciplines. S. Solco (2013) describes the new professional skills of teachers following from the changed role of the teacher in the modern world. It is argued that the teacher must have specialized “knowledge about knowledge” to facilitate the organization of knowledge and the acquisition of students' skills in an active way; must possess the theoretical knowledge about learning and human behaviour in order to read the needs and problems of the students and of the classroom community, and also the social and family context; must create the positive climate for the learning experience; must know the techniques of verbal and non-verbal communication, diversify the language, and show coherence between feelings, emotions and behaviours; must know the main techniques and strategies of evaluation, and consider assessment as a promotional moment of the educational process. And finally, the teacher must demonstrate professional ethics concerns the role of the teacher in the moral and intellectual development of the students/ According to the importance of the designated objectives of pedagogical communication and the difficulties encountered by educators, there is an urgent need for a purposeful increase in the communicative competence of teachers.

Many countries are looking for ways to implement this task and are developing projects to improve the competence and communication skills of teachers. The WATCHME project (the technology of electronic evaluation in the workplace for highly professional education based on competence) included, in particular, training in implementation of various professional roles (evaluator of training activities, manager of the work environment, teacher, leader, member of the professional community, etc.) and evaluation their effectiveness through electronic means (Hunt et al., 2015). Criteria for analyzing the communicative competence of students (differentiated at different levels of learning) are offered by Del Rosario Neira-Pineiro et al. (2018). The authors identify the main functions, units of competence, descriptors and achievement criteria that allow planning educational and training activities aimed at promoting the development, analysis and evaluation of communicative competence. Thus, future teachers are taught, first of all, the acquisition of skills in different types of professional pedagogical activity.

Another recent trend is that feedback and assessment of activities are recognized as critical for developing professional expertise and are the most powerful sources for professional learning in the workplace (K. Ericsson, 2006) which constitutes a significant part of contemporary teacher education. Researchers suggest different ways of providing this feedback. The development of an algorithm for personalized feedback to future teachers is presented in the European Project (ACTTEA 2012-2015) which foremost purpose is to know how pre-service teachers learn from their practicum experience, that is to say, what kind of practical knowledge they activate when they engage in practical teaching situations. Spain, Finland, The Netherlands and Estonia, presupposed the training of future teachers in the planning of the lesson, its implementation and reflection of its behavior through watch the video-recording in critical positive and negative incidents (Mena et al., 2015). Meijer et al. (2002) pointed out that practical knowledge can be elicited by elaborating conceptual maps or conducting interviews. Husu et al. (2008) have considered that guided reflection is a suitable method that helps student teachers to reach higher levels of reflection as well as to elicit professional practical knowledge. The authors designed the guided reflection procedure as a model that consists of identifying critical incidents, that is meaningful events from practice that implies a turning point or change within a particular phenomenon.