Public standing of a teacher and its adjustment

Abstract

Public standing of a teacher is reflective of the customary social attitude towards the profession and associates with the efficiency of the professional practice. The dynamism of social processes determines the importance of defining modern criteria for the semantic categorization of teacher's public standing, differences in the perception of students, parents and school teachers themselves, as well as improvement of the teacher's indigenous creed. The Article presents the results of studies of particularities in the perception of the public standing of a teacher by high school students, their parents and school teachers (N = 150). Using the method of semantic differential and factor analysis, a categorical structure of the perception of a teacher's public standing has been defined, including the factors of 'kindness', 'competence' and 'prestige'. Verifiable group differences in the semantics of a 'teacher' were revealed in categorical criteria 'competence' (p ≤ 0.05). In the course of comparing particularities of perception of professional and personal public standing of school teachers, it was determined that personal self-esteem is significantly different from the professional one: educators perceive a 'teacher' as less kind, but more competent and prestigious than their 'self'. In the process of adjustment work with school teachers (N = 50), which was based on the principle of outbound mediation of personal and professional introspection processes, there was a change in the teacher's inner public esteem: bridging the distance between perception of a 'teacher' by teachers and students, as well as the convergence of its semantic evaluation with the self-esteem of teachers. The research results bring the need to find ways to increase the prestige of teachers' work in contemporary Russian society.