Personality- oriented approach to the teen-ager’s teaching of psychology

Background: When we’re elaborated curriculum “Psychology of personality” for teen-agers (13-14 y.o.), we had in mind their sex and age psychological peculiarities and also that it must be interesting and useful for them.

Aims: Program “Psychology of personality” are aimed at development of teen-ager’s self-consciousness, communicative competence and forming of their adequate self-esteem.

Methods : 1.We are using different methods of lessons “Psychology of personality” : lecture, conversation, discussion, play-competition . We are also have in mind results of our longitudinal research (1993-1997;2000) of teen-ager’s temperament, self-esteem, social status , marks.

2. After they ‘v finished , we asked them anonymously: -Are you interesting in “ Psychology of personality”? What topics are you interesting best of all? Was the learning of “ Psychology of personality” useful for you? Do you want to learn psychology later on?

3. Correctional sessions for forming an adequate self- esteem for those teen-agers, who need . We have used personality – oriented approach. Some sessions were for all group, some - special for girls, some - special for boys. On the common sessions we gave some definitions of self-esteem : what is it, forms of self-esteem, why it is so impotent to form adequate self-esteem? We also discussed some questions: what is contemporary man? What features must he has to be successful?

4. Separate sessions were devoted peculiarities of sex-role identification and connected with it adequate self-esteem. We discussed question: what is real man and real woman? We keep in mind results, which were had obtained in our longitudinal research, that girls were not quite sure in themselves. So, in girls sessions we ‘v made an accent for the forming their high and at the same time adequate self-esteem. We discussed following questions: what traits of personality are strong and how do it help teen-agers to get over difficulties?

Results : 1. Topic “Self-esteem” became the first in the rating of interesting topics. When pupils answered the first question, 74% marked their interest to the topic “Self-esteem”, 57% pupils marked it usefulness for them. 83% pupils wanted to study psychology later on.

2. Parents of the pupils marked, that when their children had begun to study “ Psychology of personality”, they became more tolerance, communicative .

Key words : Teaching of psychology, personality-oriented approach, teen-agers, forming of adequate self-esteem.