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BRIGITA RUPAR teachers than to their male colleagues, female teachers also tended to get more emotionally involved and were prepared to do more for their students than male teachers. With regard to teacher seniority, variance analysis showed that novice teachers gave much attention, energy and significance to the method of instruction implementation along with all of its elements, such as differentiation of instruction, application of active methods, student motivation, giving feedback to students etc. Senior teachers did not find that element as significant as their novice colleagues; they made their decisions with more autonomy and self-confidence, and put more significance to their experience, relying on them when choosing their teaching methods. With this study, the findings of previous studies were re-confirmed, i.e. that supervision helps to increase the level of teacher reflection. Teachers who took part in the supervision process displayed significantly higher levels of this competence than non-participants. For the purpose of this study, reflection is understood as openness for new experience, willingness to gain new knowledge about self, and curiosity for exploring own ways of thinking and feeling. The outcome was expected, because supervision uses reflection as the basic learning tool, thorough which teachers become aware of their own beliefs and hidden presumptions that run their behavior. The reflection scale also comprised its other side, i.e. rumination, the non-constructive self-focused attention, where statistical differences of the entire sample were observed at the gender level. Male teachers displayed higher levels of this negative self-awareness component, meaning that they were significantly more focused on thinking about their past actions, experienced more personal discomfort, and were less empathetic than female teachers. According to research findings, rumination is closely connected to lower self-esteem, more frequent irrational beliefs about vulnerability and hopelessness, and to less positive beliefs about the world. In order to obtain a clearer image on how teachers understood the act of reflection and how it was reflected in their everyday work, the question was also included in the focus groups interviews. According to answers, learning through supervision helped the teachers gain better competencies at two levels: they became aware of their own thoughts and emotions, and they acquired new behavior strategies. The score of the Emotional competence scale revealed that the supervision participants only exhibited higher competence on the Emotion expressing capability subscale, while no differences were observed on the other two subscales. After calculating the differences in emotional competence between teachers of different seniorities, it was revealed that teachers with shorter * 172 +
