Stereotypes in the Professional Activity of Teachers

Abstract

One of the indications of the professional deformation of a teacher is the adoption of educational stereotypes. On the one hand formation of stereotypes is one of the advantages of the human mind. On the other hand, stereotypes introduce big distortions to the reflection of professional reality and contribute to the formation of psychological barriers. The purpose of the work is to study various types of stereotypes, diagnose teachers as having stereotypes, develop methods for destruction of educational stereotypes. School teachers and University lecturers are in general of the same mind in their evaluations (when tested by proverbs test). The majority of unambiguous answers, namely, complete consent with proverbs indicate that educators use stereotypes. According to self-evaluation of educators, stereotypes hamper communication of the majority of University lecturers, and help school teachers deal with teaching objectives and moral building objectives. As a result of training on stereotype destruction 84.6% of the educators mentioned that they used stereotypes and 15.4% of them did not do so according to their self-evaluation. The gathered professional work experience conduces to stereotyping of human thinking. On the one hand, stereotyped decisions provide more than 60% of the correct professional solutions, ensure stable development of situations and profession as a whole. On the other hand, creativity in solving problems is necessary to get to the new level of professional activity. Therefore, phenomenon of “educational stereotypes” is multi-faceted. It contains both positive and negative functions.