Activity Approach in Teacher Training: Formation and Implementation

Abstract

The article analyzes changes in modern Russian education and related changes in pedagogical activity. Defining personal, metasubject and subject-based educational outcomes of students as the goals of education sets high requirements for the professionalism of the teacher, for his psychological and pedagogical competence. The professional standard for teachers, adopted in 2013, has captured new realities of pedagogical activity, providing definitions of the teaching, educational, and developmental functions of a teacher and a list of requirements for work actions and skills necessary for their implementations. The professional standard is defined as a target reference point for teacher education. The implementation of the professional standard requirements is possible with a serious restructuring of the system of teacher training practices. Traditional teacher education has always been characterized by a weak orientation to school, academism and verbalism, and the dominance of subject-based and methodological training at the expense of psychological and pedagogical, activity-based components of professional education. The article analyzes the cases of employing the activity approach in Russian teacher education, such as the one at the Krasnoyarsk state University and at the Tolstoy Tula State Pedagogical University. Also, the article describes a productive experience of implementing the activity approach in a large-scale experiment on the modernization of teacher training in 2014—2017 by the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education. It outlines the main components of the activity approach implementation in this experiment: orientation on the professional standard for teachers, modular structure of educational programs, practical orientation of the educational process.