The teacher training project "Non Da Soli - La Scuola Di Fronte All'Emergenza: La Didattica a Distanza". Tutoring as strategy of professional accompaniment

Abstract

This contribution, through the presentation of the results of the assessment process of the project “Non Da Soli-La Scuola Di Fronte All’emergenza: La Didattica A Distanza” promoted by Save the Children and supervised by the University of Milano-Bicocca, aims to outline the training process in order to define the educational role of the tutor, here defined as a figure who offers professional accompaniment to in-service teachers. This project was intended to provide through a tutoring program professional support to about 850 teachers from 70 schools distributed across 13 regions. Tutoring was provided remotely. The aim of the research is to describe the main features of the tutoring process taking into consideration the point of view of the participants -- teachers and tutors -- regarding the training methodologies adopted, educational functions enabled by tutors and the learning outcomes perceived by participants. Data was collected in July and December 2020 by way of questionnaires completed by the teachers and tutors. Descriptive uni-variate analysis and reflexive thematic analysis was applied to the data. Results indicate three main aspects of the tutoring process distributed across the following areas: a) the value of contextualizing and person-alizing the training program to meet the educational needs of the teacher; b) the value of collaboration between tutors and teachers and among teachers themselves; c) the challenge teachers faced in reconciling theory with practice. The discussion of the results draws attention to a need for continued exploration of tutoring as a training methodology for professional accompaniment of in-service teachers.