Abstract:

In recent decades, the scientific literature has gradually shifted its attention from a purely summative approach, excessively focused on the mere certification of learning achieved by students, to a more qualitative one, opening to dimensions such as the Assessment for Learning (AfL) and the Sustainable Assessment (SA). Renewing the evaluation practices aimed at students though requires a preliminary step: transforming the training courses of in-service teachers into the direction of communities of practices fueled by collaborative activities and by a constant comparison of one's own professionalism embodied in the creative and planning actions prompted by the course itself. This paper presents a teachers’ training program firmly anchored to a theoretical model that sees its beating heart in collaborative reflective processes, the Trialogical Learning & Assessment Approach (TL&AA) an integrated model of teaching, learning and assessment where sustainable and formative assessment processes are enhanced.

The training path described here is a first-level university master’s degree (60 credits, 1500 hours) called "Technologies for knowledge acquisition and skills development" (TASK), delivered in e-Learning mode by the UnitelmaSapienza University of Rome (IT). TASK is a master's degree aimed at teachers of all levels of compulsory education, university professors, trainers in the public and private sector, as well as all those who want to acquire knowledge and skills to access and operate in the world of eLearning: eTutor, Instructional Designer, Community Manager. The guiding principles of the path insist on the vision of technologies as tools that enhance teaching and learning, and on the importance of providing teachers with a support and exchange network in which to compare experiences and receive timely feedback. The novelty of the model, in fact, lies precisely in the close interdependence between learning and assessment processes, achieved step by step and not only at the end of the path, in a collaborative and not just an individual way, involving the learners in the very definition of standards, criteria and evaluation objectives. For this reason, in fact, within the Master's teaching cycle, reflective practices accompany each step.

The studies conducted so far on the evaluative-reflective processes of the TASK Master (Sansone et al., 2021; Sansone et al., 2023 Sansone et al., 2024) show, on the one hand, how the proposed peer- assessment activities stimulate an enhancement of critical thinking, metacognition, motivation to learn, thus also acting on the more general feeling of belonging to a community of practices ("opportunity to feel part of a whole where there are no predefined roles and everyone can simply be what they are; for all this I think that for me it could become a turning point, professionally and otherwise"). On the other hand, the reflection devices foreseen by the path seem to stimulate deep critical-analytical observation processes aimed inward ("Thanks to the teachers' interventions and the synchronous webinars I managed to understand and ask myself new questions, to dispel doubts and to develop new reflections"), that is towards one's own universe of past and future actions, current and desired learning, beyond a mere professional development.

Keywords:

Assessment for learning, teachers' training, trialogical learning approach, reflective process.