Abstract:

Professional reflection, as evidenced by research (Fazio, 2009; Satková, 2020), is generally considered one of the tools for the professional and personal growth of teachers. Through it, they carry out an analysis of professional knowledge, skills, attitudes and emotions. The fact is that the mentioned entities form the professional competences of teachers. It is mentor teachers, whose cardinal task is to facilitate the entry into and understanding of school practice by student teachers, who should demonstrate advanced professional skills and present to beginning teachers how to develop them also with the help of professional reflection. Diagnostic competence is particularly important, since the optimization of the educational process is mainly achieved by getting to know the needs of students and teachers. The aim of the paper was therefore to present the results of the analysis of the relationship between the implementation of professional reflection frequency (how often teachers deliberate/think about selected aspects of teaching; higher scores represents a higher frequency) and the difficulty of applying the diagnostic competence of mentor teachers (what level of difficulty they feel when implementing selected diagnostic activities; higher scores represented lower difficulty). A short version of the scale questionnaire Professional reflection types (Novocký & Orosová, 2019) was used to monitor the implementation of professional reflection frequency and a scale questionnaire of own provenance was used to map the difficulty of applying diagnostic competence. The first research tool consisted of items that related to the work of mentor teachers with regard to student teachers, and the second research tool was created on the basis of the professional standard of lower and upper secondary education teachers, selecting diagnostic activities in its three dimensions (student, educational process, professional development). Both instruments were undergone to exploratory (principal axis method, promax rotation) and confirmatory factor analysis (very good values of fit indices CFI, TLI, RMSEA, SRMR, GFI), resulting in a unidimensional solution. They showed optimal internal consistency, which we determined by calculating the value of Cronbach's alpha. 108 mentor teachers cooperating with UPJŠ in Košice took part in the research. Their average age was 49.56 years (SD = 8.68) and respondents with more than 21 years of experience had the highest representation in the research group. We did not identify a positive or negative statistically significant relationship between the mentioned constructs (r = 0.172; p = 0.074). Partial analyzes have shown that only the variable of completing training aimed at developing diagnostic competence caused a statistically significant change in the score for the difficulty of applying the diagnostic competence of mentor teachers (higher scores in favor of those who completed this training). These findings lead us to the conclusion that the professional reflection of mentor teachers does not seem to have an impact on the difficulty of applying diagnostic competence, however, in similar researches we advise to take into account its nature (intentional or unintentional) and the specification to the field of continuous education.

Keywords:

Professional reflection, diagnostic competence, factor analysis, mentor teacher.