Lifelong Learn. 2024, 14, 31-63
Professional Readiness of Secondary Pedagogical School Teachers in the Implementation of Cross-curricular Themes in Teaching
The study analyses the issue of professional preparation and education of teachers of selected secondary pedagogical schools in Slovakia in the field of cross-curricular themes and the implementation of their content in teaching with an emphasis on the development of functional literacy and key competencies of students, which are a solid basis for lifelong learning in any area of professional and personal life. The aim of the scientific study is to analyse teachers’ attitudes and opinions on (self-)education and its necessity in the field of implementation of cross-curricular themes into teaching with the intention of developing functional literacy and key competencies of their students. We chose a non-standardised electronic questionnaire of our own design as the research instrument. The research sample consisted of 72 teachers from selected secondary pedagogical schools in Slovakia, 25 to 62 years old. We processed the collected data using Excel, and for quantitative analysis, we used mathematical and statistical methods of univariate and multivariate inductive and descriptive statistics and the nonparametric Mann-Whitney U-test from the IBM SPSS Statistics statistical software toolbox, version 19. Our findings confirmed a significant difference (p-value < 0.05) in the professional preparedness of the participants to implement the cross-curricular theme “Protection of life and health” in their own teaching, with respondents with 15 or more years of teaching experience rating their professional preparedness higher (Mdn = 3; AM = 3.25) than respondents with less than 15 years of experience (Mdn = 2; AM = 2.56). The results further showed that most of the participants in our dataset (26.4%) had received training in the implementation of the cross-curricular theme of “Presentation skills and project development” in the classroom in the past 10 years, and this interest remains with them in the future, as 66.1% of them plan to receive further training in the topic. The lowest number of participants (2.7%) participated in training on the implementation of the cross-curricular themes “Protection of life and health” and “Education for marriage and parenthood”.
