Characteristics and Features of School Counselor

Abstract

The development of pedagogical science by the requirements of modern education has raised the question of the quality of professional work of a school pedagogue based on his characteristics and features. The paper discusses the problem of possessing the important qualities of a school pedagogue for educational work in school. The theoretical analysis describes the qualities of a modern pedagogue in the form of personal and professional characteristics. This research aims to examine the attitudes of teachers about the possession of important characteristics of pedagogues for school work and to point out their importance for the development of pedagogical practice. A descriptive research method with a scaling technique was used in the research. The paper presents a survey conducted in the school year 2020/2021 on a sample of 102 primary and secondary school teachers in Southern Serbia. The results of the research show that the factor analysis from the Likert-type assessment scale constructed for the needs of this research highlights four factors that define the most important characteristics of a school pedagogue: flexibility, organization and professionalism, teamwork, cooperation, and innovation. The research provided encouraging data that confirm the flexibility, organization, and professionalism of pedagogues. Professional development and encouragement of the research role of the school pedagogue were identified as opportunities for strengthening cooperative relations, teamwork, and innovation of the school pedagogue to improve the educational practice in the school. The research confirmed a statistically significant difference in the attitudes of the respondents with only one factor that brought together items related to teamwork. The differences are significant in the variable school type, p <0.05.