STRATIFIED APPROACH TO TEACHERS' COMPETENCE ASSESSMENT

Acquiring and managing professional competences of teachers is a decisive factor affecting the quality of educational process and has a significant impact on the formation of learner's personality and their learning outcomes. Nothing in education will change without the active participation of teachers, and therefore the quality of teachers, assessment of their competences, training and continuous professional development are currently considered to be a key tool for education and innovation reforms.

Competence can be understood as a characteristic feature, behavior or ability that also includes such aspects as knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and opinions, and emphasizes the ability to transfer and apply acquired knowledge and skills to new situations. All typologies of teacher competences are influenced by the time of their origin and social requirements. The question is whether each teacher is able to understand and learn all the required competences, and apply all of them equally successfully, whether some of them cannot be compensated by others, and whether the evaluator can understand all the competences identified in the literature and evaluate how they were reflected in a real lesson.

Lesson observations have a very long tradition and are largely the only ones in schools that are commonly used by evaluators. From methodological point of view observation is a direct watching of the educational process and in terms of the theory of education management one of the main forms of teaching process control. The process of observation and evaluation as well as the draft measures for improvement are recorded in the observation sheet, which contains basic information and findings from the observation, conclusions and measures to remedy the deficiencies with the set deadlines and ways to check their fulfillment. Observations and records from them are very general in this form and do not focus on specific areas of the teaching process, and not at all on assessment of teacher's professional competences.

The innovative approach to assessing teacher competences developed by the team of researchers from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra within the project APVV-14-0446 Assessment of Teacher Competences, is based on a stratified approach to teacher competences. In total, 10 key teacher's competencies were outlined. Each teacher's competence is being evaluated individually and the evaluation goes deeper into the pursuit of its application in teaching, it follows the various nuances of its manifestation. In the evaluation, however, not only the evaluator has an exclusive word based on their lesson observation record, but in the self-assessment sheet the teacher also expresses their opinion about the observed competence and after comparing the assessment and self-assessment record, the evaluator and the teacher meet and discuss together their findings and the record from this discussion will then serve for the assessed teacher as an appreciation of the positives of the observed competence and a guideline how to improve the identified weaknesses.

The paper provides a more detailed description of this approach and provides samples of the developed assessment tools.