A Comparative Study of the Qualities of School Teachers and Their Teaching Practice

There is no doubt that the characteristics of the pedagogical community influence the quality of school education: its problems are often associated with the effectiveness of teachers training and their professional growth. On the other hand, the quality of the school environment and the conditions of pedagogical work are important factors for both the positive education of schoolchildren and its real results. In this perspective, the effectiveness of the education system becomes apparent in comparison with similar systems. That is why the data of international empirical studies aimed at studying the quality of education today are extremely important both for the country as a whole and for its different regions. To take measures for the development of the pedagogical community of the Kirov region, we made a comprehensive analysis of the teaching staff of the regional pedagogical community. The concept is based on materials from the third international study Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS 2018). The purpose of this article is to compare the qualities of regional school teachers and their pedagogical practice with similar indicators in foreign countries. The author of the article, on the grounds of the comparison of working conditions, professional education and development of teachers, justifies the need for administrative decisions in personnel policy. The leading research methods here are the collection of data, obtained by questioning in maintaining feedback from teachers, analyzing the conditions of pedagogical practices, modeling and statistical processing of research results. As a result of a study conducted in 2018–2019, in which 1025 teachers of secondary schools from the Kirov region took part, the author of the article found: teachers spend, on the average, 44 astronomical hours per week to perform their duties, besides it takes urban teachers 4 hours more to make their work as compared with rural teachers; the teaching load of the younger age group teachers is 1.5 times greater than that of the older age group teachers; foreign teachers spend 6 hours a week less to perform their official duties in comparison with teachers of the Kirov region; teachers spend most of their time on individual planning, preparing for lessons, and on general administrative work, while participating in extracurricular activities and communicating with parents takes the least amount of time in the structure of official duties. The professional knowledge of teachers acquired in the process of their education is estimated below the average level from the level of full preparedness to perform their professional duties; every fifth educator notes a high interest in learning the technologies of individual teaching, teaching children with special needs and class supervision issues. The theoretical significance of the article is due to its contribution to the development of scientific ideas about the quality of school teachers in comparison with the national educational systems of other countries. Practical use of the research results allows us to build a trajectory of work with pedagogical staff based on working out and implementing a set of measures for the development of the pedagogical community of the regional educational system.