Pedagogical research and teacher education

Abstract

This paper is concerned with professionalism during teachers’ development, which is accessed thanks to two gates: a pedagogical one and a didactic one. The former highlights the problem given by final outcomes, meaningfulness of strategies, methods, and management; the latter exposes the need for reliable pedagogical coherence when time comes for in-class application, together with training methods and techniques that do not respond only to the criterion of efficiency. By tracing the way teachers’ professionalism has developed for the last decades, this paper identifies four distinct and subsequent profiles. The quick and widespread change typical of our age makes us face new paradigms: it is hence necessary to re-define according to the “learning leaders” perspective both the meaning of teaching jobs and their profile.