PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS' SELF-EFFICACY AND PERCEPTIONS ABOUT TEACHING

In recent years, in Italy, the issue of secondary school teachers' professionalism has been taking an increasingly prominent position in policy-making and academic debates at a national level. This political interest is demonstrated by the fact that, over the past 15 years, the rules and procedures of teachers' recruitment and training have already been changed three times. In fact, until 1999, the recruitment of the secondary school teacher was implemented through competitions requiring teachers to only hold specific qualifications in the subject-matter taught. According to Lisbon Agreement's principles and indications, starting from 1999, the pre-services training of secondary school teachers was provided at a university level (managed by the Faculties of Education) through a two-years Master (SSIS1, Specialisation School for Secondary School teacher). In 2010, the Ministry of Education Decree n.249 established a new annual training course at university level (called TFA(2), Active Educational Learning). In this context, it is very important to analyze the pre-service teachers' beliefs in order to understand the attitudes with which they will enter school. Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyze the role of pre-service teachers' self-efficacy (which refers to both efficacy beliefs relating to work with students and efficacy beliefs concerning teachers' management of their work, also considering collaboration with parents or management of changes) and its relationships with socio-demographical variables and the beliefs in their professionalism. Teachers' beliefs have been investigated through two main opposing assumptions: a) natural gifts, meaning that teachers consider students as having natural gifts so it is difficult to help them if they are for example ` listless'; b) Trust in education and didactics, which means that teachers could play a role in helping students to improve their abilities (also the ` listless ones'). Data of this study were collected in March 2015 during the last TFA provided in Italy. At the beginning of the course 303 pre-service teachers participated in this study by answering to an on-line questionnaire. Most of them were female (67.3%) and worked in an education context (73.3%). Results highlighted some differences in self-efficacy and teachers' beliefs between who were working in an education sector compared to who were not working in an education sector. Furthermore, selfefficacy was related to trust in education and didactics and having experience in an education sector played a role in this relationship. These results highlighted the relevance of studying pre-service teachers' self-efficacy and their beliefs before the beginning of the TFA in order to provide suggestions on how to improve the course resulting in better trained teachers.