The psychological atmosphere in a group as a key factor of the reflective activity actualization

The article describes the didactic structure of a reflexive seminar as a part of psycho-educational support of vocational training for pedagogical college students. Here we give characteristics of three reflective activity modalities, which are possible to detect during the work of future teachers at reflexive seminars. These are "positive" reflection, "controversial" reflection and "unexpressed" reflection. Students with "positive" reflection were actively involved in the discussion; they were interested in the analysis of the discussed psychological data and showed positive emotions. Students with the "unexpressed" reflection had difficulties while trying to analyze themselves from the professional point of view, and also it was complicated for them to explain their opinion. They also demonstrated lack of emotional reactions. Students with the "controversial" type of reflection demonstrated inconsistency in logic of arguments and contradictory emotional responses. They aggressively defended their points of view and rejected suggestions of other discussion participants. Described phenomenon is the lack of sensitivity to the meaning of the text, which is demonstrated by students while having a controversial discussion of professional texts. We demonstrated that a significant part of students mixed opposite concepts, and explained the author's point of view in a wrong way while interpreting pedagogical texts. After that respondents were asked to complete Fiedler's procedure of assessment, which estimates psychological atmosphere in a team and is based on the method of semantic differential. The article contains the results of statistical method (correlated, factor, cluster and dispersive types of analysis), which reveal connections between modalities of reflexive activity, sensitivity to the meaning of a text and psychological atmosphere in the study groups. By means of factor analysis using principal components method we constructed a three-factor model. By this model a cluster analysis of 9 educational groups was made. Finally, we built a 4-cluster model, stable against the various types of relationships and different rules of integration. We can conclude that, on the one hand, adverse psychological atmosphere in the group is an obstacle for actualization of reflexive activity, and this should be taken into account while implementing reflexive support tasks. However, for those respondents who have a reflexive activity developed at a sufficient level psychological climate in the team is not a significant factor.

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