Introductory Essay: Promoting and supporting the methodological skills of teachers and trainers for the successful of the teaching and the quality of the training

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to focus on the issue of methodological skills as strategic components of the development of teachers and trainers “professionalism”. It provides an opportunity to reflect on the way of thinking about all the instrumental and technical skills necessary to the teacher and trainer to face problems, emerging educational needs and challenges in the exercise of their profession. With the orchestration of an integrated set of knowledges, skills, attitudes and postures that appear both in performances and their reflection, this kind of skills pass through the professional substrate
of education and training professionals including in that “teaching” domain referring to the cognitive, affective, motivational, managerial capabilities as well as to the scientific habitus and “methodological thinking” of those who, with a certain freedom of action, work towards targets and skills.
These professionals use specific guidelines that lead them to read, interpret and understand everything that happens in the training process and to improve decision-making, led by those “winds of science” that accompany them towards an “organized and thoughtful making”. So teaching, defined in its methodological properties, becomes “scientific” in the sense that the teacher and the trainer take as a reference and introject the scientific methods, typical of the investigating scientist. Such methods for Dewey (1940) allow to work more effectively and with the best conditions as well as to refine practices with the help of research, taking control of teaching and guiding learning to develop
systems and action plans in order to achieve the objectives defined assuming that modifying an item may cause or change other elements within the system itself.