Training Primary School Teachers to Organize Collective Forms of Work in Small Rural Schools

There appears to be an urgent need to improve the system of training qualified specialists for small schools who can respond to modern changes in education, meet socio-economic needs of the village, follow the major trends in the development of school theory and practice and creatively implement the acquired professional knowledge and skills under the conditions of small different age groups. The paper aims to determine pedagogical conditions, develop and theoretically justify a methodology for training future primary school teachers to organize collective forms of work in small rural schools and experimentally verify its effectiveness. The methodology for training future primary school teachers to organize collective forms of work in small rural schools involves acquiring the content of professional training in a specially modelled pedagogical environment by students during the whole period of university study. The following empirical methods were used: observations, surveys, expert assessment, an analysis of products of students’ creative activity, pedagogical experiment, methods of mathematical statistics (a chi-square (c2)) statistic). An analysis of the results obtained from the control experiment shows some positive dynamics in the readiness of future primary school teachers for this activity (the percentage of students with a creative-and-interpretive level has increased by 16%, whereas the number of students with a fragmentary-and-formal level has decreased by 17.1%), which proves the effectiveness of the developed methodology. The experimental work has significantly enriched the axiological potential of future teachers from small rural schools and developed their system of psycho-pedagogical knowledge about the organization of collective activities of pupils from different age groups, as well as their skills needed to plan, design and organize inter-age interaction in its various forms and conduct a reflective analysis of their pedagogical activity.