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JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
intervention procedures to improve students' learning results
(Clark, Alvarez 2010).
Kelly (2008) emphasizes that a social worker must have special
knowledge and skills to ensure the complexity of social work at
the micro, mezzo and macro levels. This results in the roles of
school social workers (tab 1).
The intention of the previous table was to point out to the roles
belonging to the school social worker profession and to highlight
the role of teacher's consultant. Chui a Ling (2013) outline the
basic objectives, on which the school social workers should
concentrate while working with teachers:
to help students to fully develop their potential,
to focus on healthy personality development of children
and youth,
to help students to obtain adequate school achievements,
to promote harmonic interpersonal relationships in school,
family and community,
to help students to solve their personal, family,
interpersonal and school problems,
to strengthen links between student, family, school and
community.
The primary role of school social worker is to help students to
solve their academic, social and emotional problems and to
develop their possibilities and potential (Chui, Ling 2013).
However, they also intervene and act preventively in the case of
occurence of any risk behavior manifestation (Textoris, Lichner,
Šlosár 2014). Nevertheless, students and their families are not
the only target groups of social workers working in the school
environment. It is equally important to focus on pedagogues.
In the context of the defined issue, it seems to be necessary to
work with the teachers as well and to guide them to better use of
self-care with an emphasis on burnout prevention. The same is
pointed out by Openshaw (2008), who states that the competence
of school social workers include performing the intervention
between children and parents as well as the counseling to
members of the pedagogical school team and assistance in
programs development (prevention, projects, etc.).
Jarolmen (2014) points out that an individual adapts to his/her
environment, as well as the environment adapts to the individual.
They are constantly changing systems. It follows that the role of
a school social worker should be to identify the problems that
cause the obstacles in the performance of teachers's profession
and to help him/her with solving these problems. The
appropriate method is social counseling for teaching staff of the
school and providing consultation.
Bland, Esmalle (2012) appeal to the need to be aware of the
broader context of relations between the school and the family of
the student, which may affect the teachers's performance and can
have an impact on his/her career. In the context of described
problematics, the role of school social workers should be:
to understand school organization and its subsystems,
to understand the impacts of the institution on the
teachers's social functioning,
to gain insight about the teacher from different sources and
to systematize them,
to identify the effects involved in the teacher's burnout,
to ensure complex interventions at all levels,
to focus the attention on the interaction and teacher-
environment transaction.
4 Self-care among pedagogues
Social work in the school environment can be divided into three
levels to simplify its understanding:
work with students,
work with teachers,
work with parents.
This second level allows the ideal use of self-care models for
pedagogues. The fundamentals of social work in the school
environment have a great potential and possibilities for the
successful application of self-care programs among pedagogues,
who belong in the terms of the occurrence of negative
phenomena in work, to the most risk occupations of all.
Self-care has been in a center of research interest for a long time.
Health care has been perceived as a bearing area of self-care. In
this connections, it has been investigated in the context of
various diseases and disorders. It is currently a
multidimensionally perceived concept that deals with various
disciplines. Each of these uses evaluates and examines self-care
from their perspective.
The pioneer in the self-care topic is Dorothea Oremová, who
introduced the Deficit Theory of Self-Care (Oremová 2001).
According to her theory, it is the realization of activities carried
out within certain time. The deficiency lies in the fact that there
are situations in man's life where the increased attention to self-
care is essential. The basis is to support and sustain well-being,
healthy functioning, and continuing development throughout the
life. The very important piece of knowledge resulting from this
theory is the fact that self-care is the result of learning. Oremová
(1991) uses the term "self-care agency," which represents a
certain ability of the individual or the potential to care for
himself/herself.
Self-care currently covers various fields and represents a
complex of performed activities - that is the essence of it. Its
goal is to maintain physical and mental well-being and it is
carried on the individual's own initiative. In the past, the factor
of health care dominated in the self-care. Godfrey et al. (2010)
analyzed 139 definition of self-care, outlining seven of the main
aspects that most often appeared in the examined definitions and
that were related to the health area, pursuit of purposeful actions
or preventive activities.
Today the situation is different and although health care is still
one of the most important domains of this issue, it is
supplemented by additional components, for example
psychological (Rehwaldt et al., 2009) and spiritual (Ellisová,
2000). From social work perspective, four components are
usually distinguished in terms of the activities carried out
(Figley, 2002; Newell, Nelson-Gardell, 2014; Moore et al.,
2011; Aguilar, 1997): physical, psychological, social, spiritual.
In Slovakia, only a few authors are concerned with the self-care
problematics. Some of them focus on the creation and
verification of methodologies - measurement tools to capture the
perception of self-care requirements in the professional life of
helping professionals, the actual realization of individual
activities as well as their effectivity (Lovaš, Hricová 2015;
Hricová, Janečková 2015; Lichner, Lovaš 2016; Halachová,
Lovaš 2015, Mesárošová 2017). Part of them deals with the
relationship between self-care and the various negative
phenomena among workers in helping professions (Hricová,
Vargová 2014; Ráczová, Vasková 2015, Köverová, Ráczová
2017a; Köverová, Ráczová 2017b; Mesárošová 2014), but even
among students - future helping professionals (Mesárošová
2016).
5 Pilot study
The aim of the research was to investigate the correlation
between stress and burnout in the pedagogical profession. Two
questionnaires have been used: PSS 10 and MBI.
The Perceived Stress Scale methodology measures the extent to
which an individual considers life situations as stress (Cohen,
Kamarck, Mermelstein 1983). The name, resp. the content of this
scale is most commonly referred to as the "level of perceived
stress". The questionnaire consisted of 10 questions focused on
feelings and thoughts that respondents experienced during the
last month. Respondents responded to each item in the
questionnaire through a 5-point scale. 1 meant that they had
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