Personal and social training as a part of class teachers’ lifelong learning

Introduction: The presented paper deals with the issues of the work of class teachers and their further education in the field of personal and social training. The main goal of the research was to find out about changes in personal and social development after the realization of social-pedagogical training. Methods: On the level of personal development, the authors were interested in the field of values and attitudes. On the level of social development, they focused on the changes in communication and opinion scales. The changes in the above fields were measured by means of a pre-test and a post-test which were administered before and after the realization of the training. Results: In the participants of the realized research, the research team, to a certain extent, succeeded in reducing prejudice and beliefs and the participants learnt about the necessity of considering students’ individual abilities and specific environmental influences on their behavior and manifestations at school. On the level of opinions, there was a shift towards a stronger belief in the significance of the impact of the environment and the family background on students’ behaviour and their personality traits. Discussion: The presented data are the results of a pilot probe and have brought initial insights related to the presented issues for the purposes of a longer and deeper research, which is in the phase of its realization. Limitations: As the project was realized with ten groups of teachers showing a deep interest in participating in it, it is not our ambition to generalize the obtained results; nevertheless, we find them interesting and inspiring. Conclusions: Along with knowledge from pedagogy and psychology, class teachers need a huge amount of creativity, ideas, techniques and methods, which can promote the development of students’ value orientation. The authors can see a clear perspective for teachers’ lifelong learning here