Modern-day educational system, including preschool, cannot achieve its goals and accomplish its educational mission without interpersonal cooperation and teamwork between professional workers. Two types of professional workers are employed in preschool: preschool teachers and assistant preschool teachers, who interact and coordinate their educational work, which is oriented towards achieving the set goals and developing children’s potential. A team is formed on the basis of positive interdependence and with the aim to set and reach common goals, which individual professional workers could not achieve on their own. Teamwork can have multiple phases in form of team-based planning, team-based implementation and team-based evaluation. Teamwork enables preschool teachers to work with children more effectively and safely. A team is successful and effective if its members trust each other and have established friendly interpersonal relationships, which are a result of successful and constructive problem-solving, appropriate communication, mutual respect and mutual support. If preschool teachers consider the principle of professional development, they have to focus, in addition to children’s development, on the development of their own team, to make it more creative and better organised, to assure appropriate distribution of work and roles, and to strive for good communication and professional relationships within the team. It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of teamwork, yet it can be perceived. In the research, we tried to determine how preschool teachers and assistant preschool teachers perceive teamwork in preschool. Our research included 164 preschool teachers and assistant preschool teachers working in Slovene preschools, who responded to our survey. We studied how they perceive the importance of teamwork and phases of teamwork, what the difference between preschool teachers and assistant preschool teachers is in the self-perception of being involved in a team, how they evaluate their mutual coordination in the field of educational work and responding to children, how they assess the effectiveness of their own teamwork, and where, in their opinion, is still room for improvement of their own teamwork. We determined that teamwork is attributed higher importance by preschool teachers than by assistant preschool teachers. The majority of professional workers in preschool confirm that they are involved in all three stages of teamwork. Team-based evaluation seems to be the most difficult stage and also the stage most of our respondents want to improve. We determined that preschool teachers and assistant preschool teachers assigned high ratings to the involvement in teamwork in the field of different everyday activities and preschool work. Preschool teachers assigned higher ratings to the involvement in teamwork in the field of the cooperation with parents and the activities of planning, implementing and evaluating the annual work plan, thematic clusters, everyday preparations, various projects and outdoor activities. Assistant preschool teachers, on the other hand, desire to improve their teamwork skills in the field of communication. Preschool teachers and assistant preschool teachers perceive their teamwork at the department as very effective and they believe that their efforts in the field of educational work and responding to children are very coordinated. Scheduling time for teamwork is perceived as the main teamwork-related difficulty. This research confirms that preschool teamwork is a positive practise, both in terms of relationships and advantages.
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