Model of forming the research competence of vocational education teachers during practical training

Abstract

The relevance of this theoretical study is determined by the renewal of the regulatory framework of vocational and pedagogical education, the strengthening of requirements for the quality of practice-oriented training, and the need to prepare a vocational education teacher as an agent of educational change who is capable of analysing professional and pedagogical situations, conducting pedagogical inquiry, substantiating decisions on the basis of data, and implementing local educational innovations. It has been found that contemporary studies describe individual components of research competence; however, they do not sufficiently reveal the specific features of integrating research tasks into the practical training of future vocational education teachers, particularly at the intersection of the psychological-pedagogical and sectoral-technological components of their professional activity. The purpose of the article is to theoretically substantiate and construct a model for developing the research competence of vocational education teachers during practical training and to disclose its substantive content. The study is theoretical and modelling-oriented in nature. It is aimed at constructing a conceptually coherent theoretical model that
may serve as a basis for further experimental verification. A set of interrelated theoretical methods was used, with the procedure for their application operationalised at the research design stage and presented in the article: normative analysis, targeted content analysis, comparative-pedagogical analysis, synthesis, generalisation and systematisation, and structural-functional modelling. A holistic structural-functional model is proposed, which integrates social demand, regulatory requirements, methodological approaches, pedagogical conditions, stages, criteria, and the expected result. The model comprises five interrelated blocks: social-normative, target-methodological, content-related, organisational-procedural, and diagnostic-resultative. The scientific novelty of the proposed model lies in the fact that each block consistently takes into account the dual nature of the vocational education teacher’s activity: the combination of psychological-pedagogical and sectoral-technological components, the connection between research actions and real tasks of practical training, the mentoring triangle “student – higher education institution teacher – mentor from the practice base”, and the micro-research format for testing pedagogical decisions. The system-forming characteristics of the model have been identified, namely: scientific approaches, principles, and pedagogical conditions for its implementation. In the article, practical training is interpreted not as a space for testing ready-made methods, but as a specially organised educational and research environment in which the future vocational education teacher learns to identify a problem, collect empirical data, interpret them, test pedagogical decisions, and present the results. The practical significance of the proposed model lies in the possibility of using it to update educational programmes for the training of vocational education teachers, programmes of pedagogical and industrial-pedagogical practice, individual assignments for students, methodological materials for mentors, and tools for internal monitoring of training quality, as well as for further empirical verification.