רצף הכשרה והתפתחות מקצועית של מורים בישראל: רטוריקה מול שגרה מעורפלת

This paper addresses a central issue regarding the professional development of teachers. The paper focuses on the idea that continuous professional development, if planned and carried out effectively, is a necessary condition for developing teachers' abilities to cope with the demands of their job. The concept of a continuum in professional development is already well established in the literature of those who provide services to clients in order to promote and nurture their personal growth and self-empowerment. In these professions, among them teaching, there is a constant need to adjust to the enormous and rapid changes characteristic of the information age. As a consequence, concepts such as "novices" and "experts", as well as the distinction between various levels of expertise, have become common in professional jargon. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the implications of the unequivocal need of teachers to learn and develop their knowledge and skills throughout their professional lives. This idea is presented as a model of the different stages on the continuum of professional development, which begins at pre-service training. The second part of the paper presents the main findings from a study whose purpose was to examine research questions derived from a literature survey and from the above-mentioned model. The article represents in brief the main theoretical and empirical findings from a study conducted during the years 2006–2008 as part of a research network at The MOFET Institute.