Extract

Palmira Peiuliauskien Pre-service Teachers’ Research Activity during the Pedagogi- cal Practice: Situation and its Development Relevance: Teacher’s activity and role change in a wanton society. Traditional pedagogy emphasizes the main roles of a teacher – subject teacher, mentor, and tutor. It is obvious that these are the main roles of an educator and their impor- tance is undoubted. However, a changing educational practice and a new con- ception of education quality require new roles of a teacher – innovator, advisor, and prompter of learning processes, researcher, and others. Research activity be- comes the realia of teachers’ educational practice which enables them to analyze particular learning situations, capacitates them to think of their actions, peda- gogical interaction with learners, and ascertains them of the efficiency of new teaching methods (Wells, 1995; Herling, 2000; Descy, Tessaring, 2002). It is not simple to determine the place of pedagogue’s research activity compe- tence in the general structure of his professional competences, because there are various models of professional competence. One of the latest models of peda- gogue’s professional competence is defined in “Common European Principles for Teacher Competences and Qualifications”, 2005. According to it, four groups of pedagogue’s competences are distinguished: cognitive, functional, personal and ethical competences. The competence of the research activity is attributed to the group of cognitive competences. Moreover, learners’ cognitive competences, re- flective and learning to learn competence are also attributed to the cognitive competence. In the last two decades educators from various countries (the USA, Great Brit- ain, Canada, and Australia)...