Abstract:

Professional development is one of the key areas of a teacher’s praxis. It directly affects the quality of teacher’s teaching and student’s learning.

Innovative approaches to the teacher’s professional development are based on the active role of teachers, their mutual cooperation, on experimenting, action research, while the content is being determined by current questions and problems of their own pedagogical praxis.

The aim of the contribution is to analyze current knowledge regarding the state of the teacher’s professional development in Slovakia from the point of view of the attributes of the effective professional development. We analyze professional and scientific publications dedicated to the teacher’s professional development in Slovakia in the past 5 years recorded in the databases (Scopus, Proquest, EBSCO etc.). The model of professional development so far implemented in Slovakia was marked by the tendency of external control of professional performance through performance indicators, low level of internal motivation and teacher’s autonomy. The traditional forms of the teacher’s education, lectures, one-day workshops, seminars and conferences, have been dominating. Their weakness is mainly that they often are not implemented in the teacher’s natural work environment, i.e. in schools, and that their content often does not reflect their needs, neither the needs of their schools and students. This is also related to the low transferability rate of the education results into practice. The findings prove the need of supporting effective changes of the teacher’s professional development in Slovakia, in particular the need to motivate teachers to mutual learning in the school environment, to cooperate and the need of mutual action research of their own praxis and of the usage of various forms of the professional learning directly in the praxis.

Keywords:

Teacher’s professional development, effective teacher’s professional development, models of teacher’s professional development.