Keyword: «educator`s professional self-awareness»

Mastery of teacher’s empathy forms the foundation for fruitful communicative expertise in daily teacher-student interaction and promotes development of professional self-awareness. Empathy acquisition as a professional competence of a teacher makes an actual task. Solution of which can be achieved by deliberate training and self-training. The present research was targeted at deducting the impact of subjective Teacher-Student empathetic communication on the solution of such didactic tasks as overcoming emotional stress caused by the urgent need to digest masses of vocational information, creative positive teaching and learning media, motivation of general cognition. Within the research, the identification of the actual level of empathy among the English language teachers of the Russian University of Economics named after G.V.Plekhanov (Moscow), all of them having a long record of practical educational experience, was detected. Empathy as a personality feature is the ability to comprehend and share the emotions of another person. Actually, didactics and psychology define the phenomenon of empathy as a personality trait activated in situations of communication, cooperation and behaviour as it is. Researchers and practitioners in different social sciences share the opinion of empathy as one of the most important factors supporting a personality as a whole in its diverse roles. It helps an educator cope with daily most complicated tasks of communication preserving and accumulating competences and resources. Lack of striving to empathetic communication or the loss of it may lead to different problems, from losing contact with learners and colleagues to emotional burn-out. Several psychological techniques were selected to conduct the research. The results showed the probants’ statistically high level of developed empathy, also confirming the authors’ hypothesis of empathy having a significant value for their professional self-awareness. Authors’ observation confirms the idea that empathetic approach (within the humanistic approach) not only supports successful teaching activity but provides positive emotions and desire for creative progressing.