Abstract:

In recent decades, we have witnessed and experienced the emergence of digital technologies, significantly influencing the way people live and relate.
By this we mean that the professional development of teachers – PDP – takes as its starting point the need to develop skills and abilities required to practice their profession, seeking to integrate ICT skills in order to use them as educational resources. In addition, it is necessary to seek a specific knowledge enhancement including didactic and methodological learning-skills that aim at a more meaningful and constructive learning to change teachers’ attitude (Barbosa, 2011).
In the literature there are a number of PDP models which assume teachers’ change in attitude, however, we will focus our attention on the Professional Development and Teacher Change (Guskey, 2002) and also on the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (Clarke and Hollingsworth, 2002).
The teacher must be the first to believe that the changes must be identified a priori in the context of classroom practices, because when teachers prove learning happens by looking at the outcomes of students, they automatically incorporate the cognitive and behavioral level, which will be reflected in their beliefs, values and attitudes. To do this, Guskey (2002, p. 383) proposes a model of change that has the following features: i) professional development; ii) change in Teachers’ classroom practices; iii) change in student learning outcomes; iv) change in teachers’ beliefs & attitudes.
However, the model proposed by Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002), entitled Interconnected Model of Professional Growth, is based on mechanisms of changes, which happen upon the connection of each domain in the experiential world of teachers, namely: i) personal domain (knowledge, beliefs and attitude); ii) Domain of Practice (Professional experimentation); iii) Domain of Consequence (silent outcomes); iv) External Domain (External Source of information or Stimulus). This model brings some concepts such as mediation, collaboration, interactions between colleagues, concepts that offer multiple possibilities of application, not restricting only to contexts of classroom, but also including informal contexts such as virtual communities or social networks aimed at the DPP. We provide the example of PROEDI social network, which aims to explore new approaches to training and professional development of teachers who emerge from the context of the paradigm known as Web 2.0.
Therefore, the central objective of this paper is to promote a reflection on the challenges that globalization imposes on school and teachers in an attempt to foster the development of skilled citizens prepared to exercise their citizenship in a complex and unpredictable society, in which knowledge is the supreme good. To do this we will start by characterizing the 21st century competencies according to the proposals of the main international bodies like UNESCO, European Union, OECD, etc.; then we will focus our attention on the professional development of teachers, in particular the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth of Clarke & Hollingsworth (2002), highlighting its relationship with learning in informal contexts, by acknowledging ICT has multiple learning enhancers.

Keywords:

Challenges, globalization, competencies, PDP models, teachers.