Abstract:

In recent years there has been a sustainable state policy in Bulgaria for raising the qualification and qualitative change in the social status of the Bulgarian teachers which are more than 72 000. This policy has led to the allocation of significant resources for qualification and professional development of the pedagogical specialists and at the same time has an increasingly significant impact on the overall educational environment. The rapid introduction of information and communication technologies as well as the orientation towards the development of the competence approach in preschool and school education significantly change the conditions, requirements and opportunities for the professional development of pedagogical specialists. The paper presents a web based software platform developed for automation the management, conduction, monitoring and digital estimation of the professional trainings and qualification progress of the pedagogical specialists in Bulgaria. The platform serves as a register of the qualification trainings for the pedagogical specialists. It utilizes several user roles: administrator of the register, which is an employee at the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science; training provider, which is an employee at an organization delivering professional qualification training; trainee, which is a pedagogical specialist who participates in the training. The platform supports the automation of the process of application and evaluation of the training programs for professional qualification based on training program name, short description and trainers of the program, duration of the training, target groups of pedagogical specialists, form of training and form of qualification evaluation after completing the training. In addition, the platform provides a tool that can advise the pedagogical specialists for the relevant available trainings based on automated expert evaluation of individual information about the pedagogical specialist. The software system also provides evaluation of each qualification training both before and after its conduction and thus allows effective automation of the monitoring, evaluation and assessment of the qualification progress of the pedagogical specialists. More than 1 200 qualification training programs are conducted using the developed software platform in the period 2018–2021. The three main thematic areas in which the qualification trainings are organized concern innovative teaching methods, building a positive school environment and modern management methods. Most of the trainings are not focused on a specific subject rather on different professional competencies of the teachers and new approaches in education. Based on the gathered data for the conducted qualification trainings as well as additional surveys among the trained pedagogical specialists the software platform allows reliable monitoring of the whole process of knowledge transfer – from the trainers in the professional qualification courses to the pedagogical specialists, the exchange of knowledge, skills and experience between the pedagogical specialists themselves as well as the teaching of the students' learning content and the results achieved by them.

Keywords:

Pedagogical specialists, professional qualification training, qualification progress, software platform, knowledge transfer.