Professional orientation of future teachers in technical education in Cuba

In the present work the arguments of the importance of preparing the teachers of the polytechnic institutes are given, to face the professional orientation towards the formation of the future teachers of Technical Education. The authors approach this process starting from the analysis of the current situation in the choice of the pedagogical career, to propose a Program based on the scientific and methodological work to be developed in the fundamental activity, which is the class.

Abstract: Presently work the arguments of the importance are given of preparing to the educational of the polytechnic institutes, to face wing professional orientation toward the formation of the future professors of the technical teaching. The author approaches this process leaving of the analysis of the current situation in the election of the pedagogic career, to propose a Program based on the methodological motivation to develop in the fundamental activity that is the class.

Technical and Professional Education has the social mandate of training workers suitable for a constantly changing world of work, where it is required to have guaranteed qualified and specialized teaching staff, to give continuity to the teaching and technological process.

According to the modifications and study plans through which Professional Technical Education is passing, in force since the 2009/2010 school year and whose objective is to achieve that in this subsystem the technicians and workers that are required in each territory are trained, in Corresponding to the needs of the country, the Isla de la Juventud special municipality currently trains these qualified personnel with the level of ninth and twelfth degrees established respectively.

For graduates in this modality, the completion of the studies is equivalent to the pre-university level, provided they intend to continue university studies in the career related to the specialty studied.

This constitutes a terminal education, the purpose of which is to prepare for work, with immediate incorporation to the job.

Entry with the approved twelfth grade is valid, with a two-year duration, which is the least common among applicants to technical branches.

At present, the young person who graduates from Basic Secondary and is inclined towards polytechnic preparation, is limited to the option of the specialties that are offered in their locality, as they are necessary in that period and with a vision of the future, which does not in all cases it is related to the inclination, motivation and personal interest about their job or professional aspiration.

In general, all those students who aspire to another specialty and do not see their desire achieved, either due to a low academic index or not meeting additional requirements, their main option is to join these offers. For these cases, the so-called reorientation has been established, where young people, once persuaded, give up their aspiration and join the specialty for which they were not oriented and much less motivated, but which constitutes a need of the moment in the territory or in the country.

It is then necessary to direct professional orientation, according to the needs and conditions of the social context in which students develop, so that their teachers, based on the diagnosis of professional interests, can influence the motivation for studying careers pedagogical, according to the particularities and needs of technical specialties.

The student of polytechnic education, framed between 15 and 18 years of age, the beginning period of youth, where not all acquire their development in the same way and at the same time, is constantly in need of guidance; That is why it is very important that their teachers know the characteristics of this stage of life, their interests, tastes, aspirations and motivations to work on raising their quality, through the educational teaching process.

Guidance in the school environment functions as a process that can and needs to be programmed and directed. It is done through the self-determination of the student himself, who assumes and takes responsibility with his decisions in an environment of freedom and total spontaneity, with the conscience and responsibility that society demands.

When the bibliography is reviewed, there are several specialists who define the orientation itself, understood as “a process of continuous help to all people, in all its aspects, with the aim of prevention and development, through educational and social intervention programs, based on scientific and philosophical principles ”.

Orienting means, among its meanings: " To indicate to a lost individual the direction they have to take in order to reach the goal of their trip." In a second sense, it is defined as: “ Indicate to someone, in particular a child or adolescent, the studies and profession that best suit them, taking into account their tastes and abilities on the one hand, and on the other the situation of the labor market. "

Del Pino, JL (1995) has approached orientation in his research as “the scientific activity of defining and implementing how to effectively help someone at a given time and space to facilitate the highest level of personal growth possible, according to the specific stage of development in which he is and his concrete social and personal situation in the educational orientation, and that someone is the student and the space is the school environment ».

For Ayala (1998), orientation is a process of relationship with the student, the goal being the clarification of the vocational identity, stimulating the decision-making capacity and seeking the satisfaction of their internal orientation needs, as well as the demands that the outer reality presents you.

In these and other definitions there are points of agreement, such as:

• The need to help the individual, with a programmed purpose.

• Based on scientific principles.

• The need to develop their vocational identity, the satisfaction of their own needs, taking advantage of their development potential, according to social opportunities.

• The need for guidance that every individual has.

• Different educational agents intervene in the orientation process, which interrelate and provide valuable help to the student; among them we can highlight the help of the family.

In the professional field, it is observed that with the technical scientific development achieved, the emergence of new branches and the training of future graduates with a broad profile, the student needs more information, more preparation to make their professional choice adequately in tune with their possibilities and social needs.

The purpose of all educational orientation, in the opinion of Collazo Delgado, Basilia is to form a healthy, efficient and mature personality, with an integral development of all their potentialities, capacities and abilities that prepares them for life and to carry out the tasks of their own. age.

It is precisely at this stage of student life, when the young person from polytechnic education is presented with the possibility of continuing to raise their preparation, in order to opt for a pedagogical career, which requires the most effective professional guidance, that will undoubtedly guarantee its acceptance and materialization depending on the quality and consistency with which it is carried out.

In the current specialties, highly qualified future technicians are trained in the Technical and Professional Education centers of the Pinero territory, which constitutes the main source for entering the study of the pedagogical career in their specialty or others depending on the needs of the territory.

According to current regulations that provide for entry to study and preparation in the prioritized specialties, Agriculture and Construction, its graduates will constitute the new source of employment in the technical branch. Hence all the effort that the Educational Directorate develops in terms of ideopolitical work with students in their respective centers of origin, the community, political and mass organizations and the family, to guarantee their acceptance and future training, to be able to carry carry out the necessary works in the field of construction and the development of current and future agricultural programs, fundamentally.

This suggests that if the forecasts are fulfilled, Technical Education will be able to count on a considerable number of students inserted into the study of these careers, with which the municipality would have a first way of solving the coverage of teachers in its polytechnic centers within a period brief, with the limitation that only three specialties will pay for possible admission to the University of Pedagogical Sciences

. However, where is the teaching coverage in the polytechnics of the Isle of Youth?

A current reality is the fact that with the exception of the Polytechnic Institute of Informatics, which has a full faculty, both for general and basic training subjects as well as for techniques, in the rest of the Technical and Professional Education centers there is a shortage of teachers for each of the specialties.

This deficit of teachers brings with it the corresponding impact on compliance with the study plans and the professional guidance strategy established by the centers, with a view to guaranteeing the implementation of actions to enhance pedagogical motivation with students who show an inclination for the work teacher.

In order to guarantee the training of the youngest replacement in teaching, during the last school years the University of Pedagogical Sciences has assumed the opening and preparation of the students, who from the polytechnic join the Habilitation Course, where the admission figures exceed or at least meet the expectations for each of the courses traditionally offered, in correspondence with the minimum fee agreed with the National Directorate of Education.

In fact, it is achieved with the numerical incorporation of students to careers, but what happens with vocational training and professional orientation?

Both terms in the motivational aspect of the student body, as an essential issue, acquire a singular importance in pedagogical professional training.

It has been an interest of the Program of the Communist Party of Cuba, when deciding on the basic requirements that must be taken into account to perfect the selection of teaching staff, so that in the Thesis and Resolution on Educational Policy it is stated: « Due to the nature of its function, by the continuous contact with the students, by the prestige that his knowledge and his experience give him, the teacher becomes the image of society… for this reason, his scientific training and pedagogical technique, his ideological political attitude and his habits personal, they must live up to the high mission that society has assigned to him.

According to the organizational and monitoring work in all the centers of the subsystem, it is to be expected that this mass of young people has gone through a systematic and deepening work in the orientation towards the future career, where the specialty teacher plays a decisive role in each of the centers from which they come, as well as the other members of the commission created for this purpose.

As a result of recent research, which has addressed the issue related to the effectiveness of the pedagogical professional guidance strategy that is designed for each of the educational centers, where polytechnic education is also included, its conception in correspondence with the particularities of each center and the needs to train teachers based on their students.

The mastery achieved by educators about the meaning of the guiding task and the need to directly influence students in terms of vocation is recognized, although there is a lack of clarity regarding the variety of activities to be developed, the responsibility of the entire The faculty and not only the teachers of technical subjects and members of the Center's Professional Pedagogical Guidance Commission, as well as their connection with the content of the classes.

The application of instruments in research provides data that are closely related to the reasons why, after a certain time of the school year, dropouts occur, related to those students who arrived at the specialty and who were redirected at some point towards another in which a completeness in figures was needed.

Those who were not part of the movement of monitors at some time had limited participation in activities that motivated them for teaching, as well as those with whom a teaching vocation was not systematically formed in them from the Pedagogical Classroom created, as a preliminary phase in the incorporation of young people from teaching to the pedagogical career, with a personological approach.

This personological approach to professional orientation, conceived by Viviana González, is expressed in its entirety in the understanding of the active role of the student in the process of choice, training and professional performance to achieve a high level of self-determination in professional choice; This is achieved from the professional education of the personality directing the orientation work towards the development of the motivational sphere and of the subject's personality, that is, of their knowledge, skills and abilities, professional motives and interests and the development of the self-evaluation of the subject and of personality qualities such as: independence, perseverance, flexibility to be able to select their profession based on their self-determination.

His self-determination, at the proposal of the aforementioned author, is the result of a complex process of reflection on the part of the subject, in which the final decision regarding his professional future is the result of the analysis, not only of his interests and professional aspirations., but also and closely related to their motivation, their knowledge and skills and the real possibilities that society offers them to study one profession or another depending on the needs to train professionals in one or another branch.

It is important that they develop their conscience, and that the teacher, understanding the important role of ideological political work in the orientation of the student and their family, has it conceived in the activities of the strategy to be developed in the classes, fundamentally; in the pedagogical interest circles, the pedagogical classrooms and directly in the activities that the monitors must carry out in all the subjects.

Hence, the importance that the authors attach to the preparation of teachers of polytechnic institutes, to assume the pedagogical professional orientation of their students, from the first year of study.

There must be an orientation program in which the actions to be developed by the teachers are established, having as a fundamental framework of application the classes that develop all the subjects, in search of enhancing motivation and entry to pedagogical careers that meet current needs Of the territory.

This program will be functional as a complement to the strategy established in each center, with the difference that it is designed with the intention of being applied by all teachers and that all directly influence the vocational training of their students towards pedagogical careers. from the following ideas:

• Strengthen the work of the monitors in all subjects.

• Develop the Pedagogical Scientific Society, in the second year of study.

• Promote the Pedagogical Classroom throughout the third year.

• Train the most motivated (habilitation course), in their fourth year.

• Train the teachers of the Polytechnic Institutes for its materialization, from the classes.

• Commit the School Library and Computing with certain actions for the search for information and the development of events.

• Guide and train managers of polytechnic centers in their evaluation and control functions.

• Establish a recognition system for schools and students, according to the results achieved.

• The domain and application by the members of the pedagogical professional guidance commission of each center.

• Permanently check your results at the center level.

• Directed by the Director of the institution, executed by all teachers, controlled by the Educational Coordinating Professor (PCE), disclosed and assured by the School Library.

• Recognize the results in the periodic evaluation of teachers, from controls to classes.

• Promote the holding of events, contests and presentations, with the use of New Information Technology and Communications.

• Bring the results to the community and family of the students inserted in each modality.

Bibliography

1.- Ministerial Resolution No. ___

Study plans for entering the ninth grade…

Study plans for entering the twelfth grade…

2.- What we understand by orientation. CEAPA Magazine. Madrid. Digital support. 2010.

3.- Concept of Educational Guidance: Diversity and Approach.

Ibero-American Journal of Education (ISSN: 1681-5653). Venezuela.

4.-Guidance in pedagogical activity. Basilia Collazo Delgado. Maria Bridges Albá. Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 1992.

5.- Psychological Orientations. G. Torroella (in the printing process).