PREPARATION OF TEACHERS IN UKRAINE’S POSTGRADUATE EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS ON ORGANIZATION OF INCLUSIVE SCHOOL EDUCATION

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of training teachers in organizing inclusive school education and to the role of Ukrainian postgraduate education institutions in it. The influence of external factors (the socio-economic condition of the country and its health care system, educational concepts and legislative acts, environmental threats) on the development of inclusive education in Ukraine has been demonstrated. The difficulty of introducing the inclusive form of education in the modern educational system of Ukraine has been outlined, consisting particularly in the lack of qualified staff, insufficient material resources for equipping inclusion centres, the imperfect content of education, the lack of clearly defined standards for the assessment of teaching children with disabilities, etc. The structure of teachers’ readiness for the organization of inclusive forms of education has been determined to include motivational-personal, cognitive-operational, and reflexive-evaluative components. A criterion-diagnostic toolkit of teachers’ readiness to work with children with certain peculiarities of their psychophysical development has been substantiated; relevant criteria (personal-value, informational-activity, design-analytical) and level indicators (high, medium, low) have been specified. We have developed and experimentally tested a methodology of teacher training in postgraduate education institutions in organizing inclusive school education. It is presented as an open system consisting of target, content, procedural and effective components and comprises a comprehensive teacher training program for organizing inclusive education. It calls for the formation in teachers of complex knowledge about the organization of inclusive education, the ability to draw up individual programs that would help with correction of a child’s psychophysical development and such analytical skills as analysing, monitoring and further adjusting of their own professional activities in the specified field. Innovative technologies and methods of work have been described. The expediency of the interactive, project and case study methods has been demonstrated. The emphasis is laid on the need for self-education. The efficiency of the experimental methodology has been proved: in the wake of the formative experiment, the number of teachers with an average readiness to organize the inclusive form of education increased from 34.7 % (recorded during the summative experiment) to 61.6 %; the number of persons showing low level readiness decreased from 65.3 % to 36.5 %. This conclusion confirms the necessity of finding new ways of organizing inclusive forms of education as numerous peculiarities of children’s psychophysical development, socioeconomic and medical issues affect the quality of teacher training.