engleski

Development of professional teacher competences for cooperation with parents

Cooperation between preschool teachers and parents of children attending preschool institutions is one of the predictors of a high quality educational process. Taking into consideration the significance of experiential skills and possibilities of professional development, competences for cooperation with parents can be developed and improved. The European Commission recognizes the importance of developing cooperative competences and encourages life-long learning through the Erasmus+ program. ‘Developing Teacher Competences for the Future’ project within that program focuses on preschool teachers’ professional development in the area of cooperation and building partnerships with parents, implementation and evaluation of gained competences and dissemination of knowledge and skills. The project presupposes ten experiential workshops through which preschool teachers’ professional competences attempt to be improved. In order to measure the outcomes of the workshops, a Questionnaire of preschool teachers’ (self)evaluation was constructed for preschool teachers involved in the project. The Questionnaire’s reliability was determined using the Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient, and it is very high (λ=, 945), with high item coherence (F=6, 37 ; p˂, 01). The sample was convenient and included 16 preschool teachers form five different countries (Greece, Croatia, Norway, Poland and United Kingdom). The results of this empirical non-experimental research indicate that at the end of the professional training there was a statistically significant difference in preschool teachers’ self-evaluation of knowledge about the objectives of cooperation with parents (t=2, 15 ; p˂, 05) and understanding of children’s wellbeing gained form cooperation (t=2, 56 ; p˂, 05). There was no statistically significant difference for other items.

experiential workshops , self-evaluation ; partnerships

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