Abstract:

The development of continuing professional education is strategically based on creating conditions and mechanisms which support the quality of general education by the means of staff development. A requirement for this is refresher courses and retraining programmes which are tailored relying on teachers’ professional needs and demands.

The continuing professional education lags professional and educational requirements of teachers and education providers and claims for personification in training, which is based on the learner-centred approach, competences, and practice, and addresses the needs of education system.
Personification of training aims rather personal development, than acquiring theory or in-field experience. At work, such personification links to the professional fulfilment, self-development, and effective cooperation with students.

The latter allows the teacher to choose the content of training program (compulsory and elective modules), its mode, rate, and forms (microlearning, internship, mentoring), as well as teaching methods, such as budding (cooperation with other specialists), shadowing (inside observation), coaching and tutoring (assistance in releasing the trainee’s potential and transferring the skills into educational practice), etc.

As the experience of the Institute for Advanced Training and Continuing Professional Education at Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University named after V.P. Astafyev has showed, when designing personalized advanced training programs, there are several problems, and one of them is identification of teachers’ needs and demands.

Conventionally, when designing a training program, the enrolling process starts with the tests or questionnaires built on the professional standard (actions at work, skills, knowledge, and competences). The personalized approach calls for other tools, such as dealing with practical tasks, cases, videos, pedagogical situations, interviews), which identify the current levels of teachers’ knowledge and skills.

This work includes the examples of advanced training programs tailored with teachers’ individual needs. The customized module-based programs (including compulsory and elective parts) allow the trainee not only to build a continuous trajectory of their education, but also provides an opportunity to study unique pedagogical experience and useful technologies produced by the best educational practices.

The personalized approach has made it possible to solve some of the problems arising in the process of creating and implementing the training programs, namely: identifying teachers’ individual professional deficiencies and needs; filling the compulsory and elective modules in customized programs; building an individual educational route; updating the forms of educational process; measuring the training programme performance, etc.

Keywords:

Personalization of training, professional development, design of educational programs.