The Pedagogical Meaning and Interrelationship of Professional Competence and the Heuristic Approach

This article provides a theoretical analysis of the pedagogical meaning of professional competence and the heuristic approach, focusing on their interrelationship. Professional competence is understood as the capacity to mobilize knowledge, practical skills, values, motivation, and reflection in response to the demands of a specific activity. The heuristic approach is examined as an approach to organizing learning through problem identification, questioning, hypothesis generation, comparison of alternative solutions, and evaluation of outcomes. In the context of preparing future military educators, the article establishes a conceptual alignment between the components of professional competence and forms of heuristic learning activity. Based on the theoretical analysis, stages for organizing heuristic learning and criteria for assessing its outcomes are proposed. No claims of empirical effectiveness are made; the proposed framework is intended to inform subsequent empirical research.