Abstract:

In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has led teachers to a profound rethinking of the "way of teaching", to a redefinition of times and spaces, to a redesign of didactic practices and the use of technologies. This situation has brought out a series of critical issues which could be summarized in some key aspects including: the increase in inequalities, the anchoring to exclusively broadcast teaching methodologies, the inability to adopt new teaching strategies, the digital reorganization of learning environments and the digital divide.

The DiGiSEL project, Digitally Improving Social and Emotional Skills of Primary School Teachers, is placed in this scenario, financed under the ERASMUS+ call (N. 2020-1-TR01-KA226-SCH-098576) with the aim of developing digital, social and emotional skills of primary school teachers through the implementation of training courses.

This aim has been operationalized into specific objectives: improving the learning abilities of primary school students; effectively manage the classroom and interpersonal communication processes; develop empathy among students; enhance creative thinking and problem solving skills; use online methods, techniques and tools; create innovative courses in digital version; produce scientific articles on all the results achieved by the project.

This paper presents the methodological approach used to achieve the first objective (Improve the learning abilities of primary school students) and the themes developed in the training courses. In particular, the investigations were conducted to identify the teachers’ training needs through the Effective Teaching Questionnaire (ETQ) (Calvani, 2014) in version 4 (ETQ4). ETQ4 is a structured questionnaire, organized into specific dimensions (planning, cognitive, management and evaluation), which aims to bring out the teacher's expertise to define an effective intervention plan, providing personalized feedback to all participants.

In this phase, the convenience sample, made up of both teachers in training and teachers in service, returned the critical areas, characterized by lack of information, naive beliefs and/or mythologies.

Based on the results obtained, the priority areas were identified and the related themes were identified in order to translate into the educational content within the DIGISEL project.

Keywords:

ERASMUS project, primary school teachers, teachers’ training needs, teacher’s expertise, effective teaching.