The psychological health of children and adolescents has long been the object of close attention of specialists, because the problem is always easier to eliminate at an early stage. True, to do this it must first be discovered, and this is where difficulties arise. Parents are often prevented from correctly interpreting a child's behavior by lack of knowledge. School psychologists could help them with this, but few reach them for various reasons. In 2021, after another tragedy involving the death of two teenagers, the government began to think about reforming the psychological assistance service in the country. Izvestia looked into how they now care about the mental balance of schoolchildren.
New concept
In 2021, the Russian Academy of Education (RAE) prepared a concept for the development of psychological services in the education system of the Russian Federation for the period until 2025. The document generally defines the goals and objectives of such a service, and also talks about the importance of improving the qualifications of specialists, developing a new professional standard and creating a federal coordinating council for psychological services.
psychologist
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In fact, psychologists did not feel any serious changes in their work from this. The presence of such a teacher in a school and his range of responsibilities still depend on the will of the leadership of the educational organization.
The current professional standard provides for a wide range of tasks: psychological education, prevention, diagnosis, correction, counseling. At the same time, according to experts, there are no clear standards for practical psychology. On professional forums, specialists often share stories about how, after coming to school for this position, they turned into a “substitute teacher” or a document specialist.
How can a psychologist help a child?
You should contact a psychologist in any situation concerning a student and his family. A school psychologist can help with career guidance issues, solving problems in the family, in interpersonal relationships, with studies, etc. However, you should not perceive a school psychologist solely as a specialist who works with children's problems. His role is positive - he helps the child painlessly go through the stages of socialization and reveal his potential.
A psychologist begins working with children even before school: he participates in drawing up a testing program for future first-graders, can conduct interviews with them, determine the degree of readiness for school and give useful recommendations to parents.
In general, a school psychologist devotes the bulk of his working time to various types of diagnostics. For example, he can find out whether first-graders are successfully adapting to school. The specialist conducts testing, the results of which are passed on to teachers and school administration, but only in the form of a general result (for example, “70% of students have been successfully adapted”). Data about specific students cannot be disclosed, and a psychologist must work with maladapted children personally and confidentially to cope with the problem.
Also, a psychologist can diagnose child-parent relationships, explore relationships within the class, study the personality traits of schoolchildren, the level of their thinking and attention. An important component of the work of a school psychologist is career guidance diagnostics, which helps to understand the abilities of students and distribute them into specialized classes - in the humanities, in technology, in science, etc.
Range of duties
But even in cases where a psychologist is allowed to perform his direct duties, their circle has to be seriously limited. Usually the work comes down to diagnosing children's readiness for school, studying adaptation to school education, career guidance and preparing for exams.
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In a bureaucratic environment, this work also takes a lot of time. “Diagnostics at school can often be presented in the form of testing students. Sounds simple: testing. In fact, this process resembles a quest,” says psychologist Svetlana Bogdanchik. — First, you need to collect written consent from all parents whose children must take the test. Then the testing itself, data processing, drawing up a report on the results, writing recommendations to the legal representative of each student who passed the test. In this case, testing can simultaneously involve several classes or even parallels. And collecting 200–250 consents from parents is not an easy task, especially in the case of tight deadlines.”
Sometimes, to make their task easier, psychologists may not report to parents. But this option only reduces the already low level of parental trust in such specialists. According to the head of the psychological service of the Intellectual school, Inga Tolstykh, on the contrary, one should strive in every possible way to establish contact with parents. “Sometimes they don’t know how to build a relationship with a child, doubt his “correct” physiological development, don’t know how to help in choosing a professional profile or university - all these issues can and should be discussed with a psychologist. Schools must have an information stand with a psychologist’s schedule and contact information so that parents can call and make an appointment,” the expert is sure.
psychologist
Photo: RIA Novosti/Grigory Sysoev
It is equally important to help teachers who regularly face professional burnout. “In a good way, you need to work with them no less than with children. It is logical to correct one person’s teaching style than to regularly work with the “victims” of his system - children,” says the coordinator of the psychological service of one of the public schools in an interview with Izvestia. “But there are also many problems here: in some cases, teachers do not trust the psychologist and will not go to him, in others, psychologists themselves have little training in working with such teachers. “Specialists who can do everything don’t often go to work with a salary of 40 thousand per rate.”
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The shortage of personnel became even more acute with the advent of an inclusive system in schools, the expert shares: “In one of our buildings there are 20 children with disabilities (disabilities - Izvestia), with each of whom you need to work for an hour a week. At the same time, there are still 800–900 ordinary children, and there is no longer enough time to consult with them. According to the recommendation of the Ministry of Education, there should be no more than 20 students per psychologist, but in reality, of course, everything is different. We have already reached this mark, but we don’t know whether they will give us another bid.”
Tasks of a school psychologist
Tasks of a school psychologist
Let's consider the most typical problems that a school psychologist solves when determining a child's psychological readiness for school. If there is a question about the selection of children for school or the advisability of postponing the admission of a child to school, then, apparently, one should confine oneself to determining the initial level of functional readiness, or school maturity (i.e., compliance with the degree of maturation of certain brain structures, neuropsychic functions conditions and objectives of school education). It is known that children with a low level of functional readiness constitute a “risk group” both from the point of view of mastering the program and from the point of view of fatigue and increased morbidity. Many of these children literally fall into the category of underachievers from the very first days, others (usually having a good level of intellectual development or well prepared for school in terms of mastering basic school skills - reading, counting, writing) can study quite well, but constantly experience excessive nervousness. mental stress, which leads to neuroticism and psychosomatic diseases.
For diagnostic functional readiness in our country and in a number of other countries of Eastern Europe, the Kern-Jirasek test is used (Appendix No. 1).[18] When the purpose of determining readiness is to early identify those children who, in order to organize their activities in the lesson, need additional attention from the teacher, in addition to functional readiness, such components of psychological readiness as the development of voluntariness are also diagnosed (primarily the ability to listen, understand and accurately follow instructions adult, act in accordance with the rule, use a model). An effective diagnostic method in this regard is the “Graphic Dictation” technique by D. B. Elkonin.
During the adaptation period, some children are very noisy, scream, rush uncontrollably along the corridor, and when they manage to “sneak away” from their floor, they use the stairs, are often distracted in lessons, and behave rather cheekily with teachers; others, on the contrary, are squeezed, constrained, overly timid, try to remain unnoticed, are embarrassed when the teacher addresses them, and cry at the slightest failure or remark; Some children have disturbed sleep and appetite, they become very capricious, suddenly their interest in games, toys, books for very young children increases, and the number of diseases increases. All these disorders (usually called functional deviations) are caused by the load that the child’s psyche and his body experience due to a sharp change in lifestyle, a significant increase and qualitative complication of the requirements that the child must meet. Of course, not all children's adaptation is accompanied by such deviations, but there are first-graders who exhibit multiple functional deviations.
It is generally accepted that the most difficult for children to adapt to school are “home children” who have not previously attended kindergarten and had little contact with their peers. Practice, however, shows that this is not true. Children who previously attended kindergarten may also experience significant difficulties in adaptation.
The question arises: how and who (teacher, school administration, parents) and by what criteria identifies the category of children who need the help of a psychologist? As experience shows, in addition to first-graders who have real difficulties in adaptation, other children are often included in this group. On the other hand, it does not include those first-graders whose external pattern of behavior does not demonstrate maladjustment, but they experience deep-seated difficulties both in mastering the program and in the emotional sphere (the option when adaptation to school occurs due to the development of the child’s personality and health ). It is no secret that a child is often brought to a psychologist when the risk of maladaptation due to inadequate pedagogical influence from parents, and sometimes, unfortunately, from teachers, has become a reality.[13]
different points of view about what the tasks of a psychologist are when working with first graders during the adaptation period. According to one of them, the psychologist should be as active as possible, helping students to adapt faster and better, and the teacher to find the right approach to each child. The psychologist pays special attention to those children who exhibit pronounced functional deviations, sleep disturbances and other signs of neuroticism.[7]
Another view is that the psychologist should use this time to gather information about each child's mental development, observing the class and intervening only in the most extreme cases.[6]
In my opinion, during the adaptation period, it is advisable for a psychologist to leave the class “alone with the teacher” and intervene only at the special request of the teacher, since during the normal course of the adaptation process, in the vast majority of cases, functional deviations go away as if by themselves, so no special work is required here. The presence of a psychologist in lessons or classes in an extended day group can be an additional aggravating moment for both children and teachers and thereby aggravate this already quite difficult period for both. The most useful form of a psychologist’s work here can be his speech at a parent meeting with a story about the features of this period, about what parents can do to make it easier for children to adapt to school.
It has already been said that most children adapt to school quite quickly, however, there are first-graders for whom this process is greatly delayed, and for some, full adaptation to school in the first year of study does not occur (it should be borne in mind that this can occur against the background of good academic performance). Such children often get sick for a long time, and the illnesses are largely psychosomatic in nature; these children constitute a “risk group” from the point of view of the occurrence of school neurosis. Children with a protracted adaptation process in all respects need special attention from a school psychologist.
children are already gloomy in the morning, look overtired, and have headaches and abdominal pain. Often these children have sleep disturbances. The fear of the upcoming work in the classroom is so great that the child cannot go to school at all on crucial days. He starts vomiting in the morning. What should a mother do in this case, should she send her child to school?
A teacher who knows his class well has an idea of the difficulties of such sensitive children, and in normal communication with the child's parents he can in a friendly manner clarify possible relevant circumstances. So, I know one teacher who, during class work, can pat a student on the head: “Rest a little, and then continue working.” The child beams, gaining courage and self-confidence and within a few minutes is ready for activity again.
This teacher uses autogenic training to help the student get rid of stiffness and relax. He also explains to students what it means to become calm again and stay calm.
Aggression is reduced and weakness of contact with others is eliminated. Such gentle assistance, which leads to self-confidence, significantly increases the child’s performance. “This, however, is not the most important thing,” says the teacher. “The main, fundamental thing here is the opportunity to overcome the fear of going to school, creating joint work between teachers and parents.”
The most important result of such assistance is the restoration in the child of a positive attitude towards life, including daily school activities, towards all persons involved in the child’s educational process - parents and teachers.
And yet, all this, and often also the desire of the school administration to obtain information about the level of adaptation of all first-grade students, confronts the school psychologist with the task of conducting a mass study of the process of adaptation of first-graders to school at the end of the first quarter.
In my opinion, the choice of methods for mass adaptation research should satisfy the following requirements:
· Measure key parameters of adaptation and maladaptation
· The information obtained as a result of the examination should not only be ascertaining, but also guide the psychologist in the reasons for possible maladaptation
· Be economical in terms of the form and time spent.
The study of literature on this issue, the practice of observing a first-grader daughter, children of the class in which the daughter is studying, attending parent-teacher meetings, interviewing parents, talking with a teacher shows that the adaptation process in first-graders is characterized by the following main changes:
· There is a physiological adjustment of the activity of the functional systems of the first-grader’s body in accordance with the changed regime and load
· Methods and techniques of new activities - the learning process - are formed and mastered
· The emotional sphere of a first-grader evaluates changes in the surrounding reality as subjectively comfortable/discomfortable and thus regulates his behavior and activities
To generally assess the level of adaptation of a first-grader to school, it is necessary to obtain qualitative indicators of these changes.
Thus, to assess the success of adaptation of first-graders it is necessary:
· Analyze data on the incidence of first-graders and their requests for medical help at school over the past period
· Interview parents
· Interview the teacher
· Conduct a group examination of first-graders using the “Houses” method of personal relationships, social emotions and value orientations
Professional requirements for the employee
- availability of higher education (a school psychologist can be hired without work experience);
- ability to conduct psychological research;
- knowledge of child and adult psychology;
- knowledge of the latest techniques and achievements in the field of psychology;
- mastery of psychotherapy methods;
- knowledge of psychodiagnostics;
- ability to conduct psychological consultations;
- the ability to determine a person’s mental state.
Specialists who have just graduated from university and have no professional work experience can get a job at the school.
5 universities to study to become a school psychologist:
- Moscow Humanitarian University, Moscow State University.
- National Research University Higher School of Economics.
- Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov.
- Siberian Institute of Business, Management and Psychology
- Russian New University.
