Educators' personal potential as their professionalism factor

The article deals with personal potential as a factor in educators' professionalism. The authors analyze Ukrainian and foreign studies on the problem of professionalism, which is considered as a qualitative characteristic of an individual that reflects a high development of their professionally important and personal qualities and skills that ensure a high work efficiency, creativity, adequate aspirations, strong work motivation and ethical values needed for the development of a specialist. Professionalism of a teacher is an integral characteristic of a teacher, which represents their general educational abilities, skills, significant professional qualities and personal image that ensure effective teaching. According to the activity approach, professional activity is the basis for educators' personal potential development and self-realization. Personal potential is a basic individual characteristic, the core of personality. The study of the problem of personal potential is complicated by the theoretical incompleteness of concept of personal potential and the methodological difficulties of its operationalization. The authors define the personal potential of an educator as a complex of psychological properties that allows them to achieve their goals by means of the accumulated personal resources and make decisions and regulate their behavior according to a pedagogical situation and based primarily on their personal ideas and criteria. The problem of studying personal potential as a professionalism factor is extremely relevant today, especially in relation to specific educators' categories