How Kindergarten Teachers Assess Their Own Professional Competencies

Abstract

One of the requirements of Education 4.0 is that students and practitioners should be involved in the creation of the content of study plans. Therefore, in the present research we focused on identifying the further educational needs of kindergarten teachers. Teachers’ educational needs were divided into four dimensions: ‘content knowledge’, ‘diagnostic knowledge’, ‘didactical knowledge’, and ‘classroom management knowledge’. In parallel, we discovered how teachers assess the level of their own teaching competencies. Based on the obtained data, we identified that teachers have the greatest need for further education in the dimension of ‘diagnostic knowledge’ and that the need for their further education in this dimension did not depend on the length of practice. In the other three dimensions, a declining trend in teachers’ educational needs has been recorded with an increasing length of practice, declining significantly in three of the four dimensions examined. The study points to the need to create in-service courses for kindergarten teachers to deepen their ‘diagnostic knowledge’ and thus ensure the sustainability of the quality of pre-school education for children. Teachers‘ self-assessment of their own teaching competencies corresponds to their educational needs, which supports the relevance of the findings on the further educational needs of kindergarten teachers. This study aimed to obtain relevant data on which the improvement of the higher education of future kindergarten teachers might be based. At the same time, this would allow the analysis and tailoring of the content of professional development courses to the needs of in-service kindergarten teachers.

Keywords

• pre-primary education
• self-assessment
• teacher competencies
• educational needs
• diagnostic competence