METHOD OF MODELING SITUATIONS IN COMPLEX PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAINING OF REHABILITATION THERAPISTS

The article deals with relevant practical aspects of the formation of psychological readiness of the students majoring in special education and teachers of secondary schools for working with children with developmental disorders in special establishments and institutions with inclusive and integrated forms of training. The paper aims to present a specially developed training exercise from the complex of the author's program, which has been experimentally tested with students of 2nd-4th years of study majoring in special education. In the process of forming future rehabilitation therapist's psychological readiness for working with special children it is important not only to provide him/her with necessary theoretical knowledge but also form the skills of understanding his/her own emotional states and the ones of the people having developmental disorders and who differ from others. The best way to provide understanding a “different” person is to model a situation where frustrations are provoked, analysed and considered indirectly. There has been proposed a special role-playing game “Teddy-Bear in the Store” where the main character is a teddy bear without a button, a girl willing to buy it and her mother who does not want to do it because the toy is “defective”. The bear is a symbol of strength and health, and a torn-off button shows its imperfection. The participants are suggested to role-play the situation proposed and dwell upon the actions of its characters, as well as to answer a number of questions concerning the actions of all the story characters. There have been worked-out the following criteria to check the effectiveness of the proposed methodology: psychological and pedagogical efficiency; motivation for proactivity and the necessity to make decisions; the possibility of generalization and application in a wide field of tasks – the qualitative indicators have confirmed the validity of the presented psychological training exercise. It can be applied both in the course of training students in the field of special education and teachers of secondary schools, in the future – integrated classes.