Abstract:

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 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 has already changed three times. In fact, until 1999, the recruitment of the secondary school teacher was implemented through competitions requiring teachers only to held 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 university level (managed by the Faculties of Education) through a two-years Master (SSIS, Scuola di Specializzazione all’Insegnamento Secondario). In 2010, the Ministry of Education Decree n.249 established a new annual training course at university level (called TFA, Tirocinio Formativo Attivo).

In this context, it is very important to analyse the pre-service teachers’ conceptions in order to understand the attitudes with which they will enter school.

Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyse 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 considering collaboration with parents or management of changes) and its relationships with socio-demographical variables and the conceptions on their professionalism. Teachers’ conceptions have been investigated through two main paradigmatic assumptions:
a) natural gifts, meaning that teachers consider students as they have 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%) worked in an education context (73.3%). Results highlighted some differences in self-efficacy and conceptions between who was working in an education sector compare to who was not working in an education sector and seniority, while no differences have been found respect to the gender.

Furthermore, self-efficacy was related to trust in education and having experience in an education sector played a role in this relationship. Those results highlighted the relevance of studying pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy and their conceptions before the beginning of the TFA in order to provide suggestions on how to improve the course resulting in better trained teachers.