Abstract:

The proposed paper is focused on the issues of the development of teacher trainees’ personal and social competences during their pre-gradual training. In its theoretical part, the focus is on the field of developing personal and social skills in a broader context. Alongside with that, the authors point out the significance of the ‘Council Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning’, which has been adopted based on the recommendation by the European Commission, and by which EU member states are encouraged to implement key competences for lifelong learning into their curricular documents. On the application level, the authors focus on vocational school teachers’ preparedness for dealing with the above demanding task and on promoting their pre-gradual training by using appropriate teaching methods and strategies. The presented research aimed to finding out about the possible shift in the opinions of teacher trainees involved in master programmes in personal and social fields after an intervention. For its purposes, the method of experiment was applied and the results of a pre-test and post-test were compared. In the research sample, statistically significant gender differences were found; and a more significant shift was observed in the field of social than the field of personal competences. The findings also point to the importance of promoting the above fields of pre-gradual training by means of interactive activities implemented into university courses within a range of study programmes. In the final part of the paper, the authors suggest university courses in teacher training programmes, within which teacher trainees’ personal and social competences can be developed by implementing activating methods.

Keywords:

Social competences, key competences, curricular documents, undergraduate training, experiment.