Abstract:

The philosophy of education is currently aimed at forming pupils’ personality to be able to life-long learning or self-improvement using individual thinking and independent action skills. Even today, the school remains a key resource for children to obtain knowledge necessary for future employment in the 21st century’s labour market.

The quality of the school (education) is influenced by several factors. One of them, maybe the most important, are competent teachers and their preparedness. That’s why teachers are an inherent factor in forming the personality of students and in the evaluation of the quality of education. When characterizing the personality of the teacher, there dominate exact understanding of the interaction between its basic characteristic and individual structure. A teacher who reflect on his own attitudes and accepts his own feelings becomes a personality also in relation to his/her pupils. Such a teacher provides pupils a trustworthy base, creating adequate atmosphere for development of personal learning needs, stimulate students’ curiosity and support students’ desire to learn.

This paper deals with the results of a comparison of the teachers’ opinions on the characteristics of the actual (real) teachers with their vision of an ideal teacher. We present an empirical research conducted at Slovak schools where respondents are teachers. The study involved 93 teachers from Nitra region. We have chosen the semantic differential as the research method. Semantic differential consists of 15 pairs of bipolar adjectives (for example sad – cheerful, quiet – noisy, modern – antiquated) ranked using a 7-point scale. We used the questionnaire form distributed in both paper and electronic form.

We describe characteristics in which are the respondents’ opinions most different for real and ideal teacher. The teachers rated the real teacher as little active and disproportionately nervous. Almost identical were the real and the ideal teachers in pair “dominants – submissive”. On the other side, the respondents consider the real teacher to be noisy and the ideal teacher should be tighter. Based on research results we can conclude that based on self-reflection the teachers recognize the differences between real and ideal teachers.

Keywords:

Vision of ideal teachers, semantic differential, teachers' opinions.