Abstract:

This paper presents some key aspects of a European project entitled “Perspectives for Lifelong STEM Teaching: Career Guidance, Collaborative Practice and Competence Development (acronym 3C4Life)”. 3C4Life is an EU-funded three years project (2021- 2024) which aims to raise the attractiveness of teacher profession and to systemically improve STEM education at European and national level. 3C4life brings together 12 partners from 6 European countries and in each country a researcher partner and an educational authority working together seek for a common goal to promote excellence, growing, interest and attractiveness of the profession for STEM teachers and STEM education.

Some European reports and other specific literature have identified those requirements that increase the attractiveness of the profession such as stablishing a positive image of the teaching progression (among teachers and society), promoting and anchoring collaborative practices and professional learning communities, embracing the use of innovative teaching approaches and setting up a perception of teaching professional as a lifelong development process, among others. However, some gaps have been reported for these requirements as for example lack of and adequate career guidance for teachers, teachers’ difficulties to approach new teaching methods, resistance to apply collaborative approaches, etc. To help to overcome these gaps the project has developed and implemented an online open digital platform (https://teach4-life.eu) which will be considered of utmost relevance for STEM teachers and as a central tool for the development of the intervention (each project partner will adopt different models to use or embedded the platform in their teacher professional development strategies and career guidance). Thus, 3C4Life partner´s efforts are oriented to support STEM teachers in their professional growth to promote the attractiveness of teacher profession considering the main 3C4LIFE missions through the use of the platform in their national contexts.

The project also evaluates the impact on teachers to provide robust research evidence to inform policy, researchers and practitioners about the effectiveness of the intervention pointing out the emphasis on different dimensions of the career guidance motivation, competence development and collaborative practices. Teacher´s attitudes and beliefs will be measured at different stages of the implementation. Withing this framework the main aim of this work is to present some results of the preliminary stages for experimental protocol (designed as a mixed-methodology), to report key aspects of the instrument's design of the quantitative approach, some indicators of validity, reliability and factorization, and discussion of early results of the baseline study carried out with pre-service and in-service teachers.

Keywords:

STEM education, Career, collaboration, competences, Teacher professional development.