Professional independence of pre-school and early school education teachers and its determinants

Abstract

The interest in the teaching profession is evident in the discussions of students and their parents, school graduates, teachers working at various stages of education, sociologists, psychologists, educators and representatives of many other professions that are simply impossible to be mentioned. Topics of these discussions are varied, they concern teachers’ qualifications and competences, their educational background, selection of candidates for the profession, personality traits, the functions they perform, teaching methods used by them, etc. Often, the participants of such discussions are not professionally connected with the teaching profession, but each of them had the opportunity to develop their own view and opinion of this profession based on many years of experience while participating, as a student, in the process of education. It can be assumed that this attention points to the significant role of the teacher in society and therefore results in frequently emotional discussions that conclude with enumeration of the teachers’ duties, skills and abilities in addition to the principles behind their actions and conduct while performing their didactic and educational work. At this point, I would like to pose the questions: What about the teacher’s independence? Does the teacher have the opportunity to carry out his or her work independently? In the article, which consists of two parts, I attempt to answer these questions. In the first part, I present theoretical approaches to the teacher, his or her qualifications and competences, with particular focus placed on the professional independence. The second part contains the results of surveys on professional independence and its determinants, conducted among pre-school and early school education teachers in the Wielkopolska region.