Abstract:

In today's world the teachers’ education is subjected to ever-changing demands. In this context, the Professional Standard for teachers (2018), actualized in Latvia, defines the indicators of professional competence, which also includes knowledge, skills and attitudes related to the holistic concept of health, understanding of the factors affecting it, as well as responsibility for one’s own state of health.

Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to support and guide the future teachers in their everyday lives so that they choose a healthy lifestyle, which is one of the basic life’s components and important prerequisite for the individual's qualitative activity and self-realization process.

In this article the interconnections between the wellness and healthy lifestyle self-management skills of students-future teachers are analysed and discussed.

This empirical study focuses on students' physical wellness and two main healthy lifestyle components: self-management skills of physical activity and healthy eating in relation to the conditions provided by the higher education microsystem.

The aim of the research reflected in this publication is to analyse the physical wellness and self-management skills of the teacher programme’s students as a resource for the development of their future pedagogical work concept. For achieving the research goal, the emerging teachers have been surveyed using the methodology developed by Corbin et al. (2008). For statistical analysis of the research data, the SPSS 22.0 program was employed: a method of descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis test, Mann-Whitney test and Kendall's tau-b correlation test. The internal consistency of the questionnaire, measured with Cronbach’s Alpha, is 0,918. Altogether 186 respondents participated in the survey: 23 of them men and 163 women.

The results of this study (Kendall's correlation test) show that there is a very weak correlation between wellness and students' self-management skills of healthy lifestyle physical activity and healthy eating (r = .161, p = .000), and week correlations between physical wellness, implementation of physical activity and healthy eating skills and a strategy for overcoming difficulties.

Keywords:

Students, wellness, healthy lifestyle, self-management.