Professional Teaching Activities in Italian Kindergarten: Self-evaluation, Staff Development and Teacher Change

The development of teacher professionalism is strongly influenced by appropriate training activities that allow in-service teachers to use their experience within specific school contexts and promote the adoption of new dispositions and joint planning practices. In a complementary manner, the use of self-evaluation methodologies and instruments and formative evaluation promotes reflective dispositions supporting and constantly improving the acquired practices. In this perspective, the in-service training programme presented herein aims to analyse the changes in representations of a group of municipal kindergarten teachers in the city of Bologna (Northern Italy), in order to verify whether the project implemented may have promoted – in terms of the teachers' self-evaluations – more effective practices of group action, planning, observation, assessment and documentation. The research hypothesis sets out that, through an in-service teacher training intervention – actively involving teachers in the simulation of planning and formative educational evaluation situations – there could be significant long-term improvements in the professional activities of the involved teachers, both in terms of mental representations and effective practices observed in a hetero-direct manner (in the second phase). In order to check the changes taking place in the representations of teachers, a self-evaluation tool was used. This tool was used, within the pre-experimental model of a predominantly explorative nature, on only one group of 41 kindergarten teachers, in two stages; firstly, ex-ante and then ex-post of the training intervention. The results obtained in the two cycles of the self-evaluation instrument highlighted various changes in the representations of teachers.