תפיסת התפקיד של המורה-מאבחן הדידקטי

Starting from the 1990s, the colleges of education in Israel have been preparing special education teachers for the role of didactic teacher-diagnostician. This paper examines how forty graduates of the didactic diagnosis course at Beit Berl Academic College perceive the role; the examination was performed by means of a follow-up questionnaire. The basic hypothesis posited that this role enables the teachers' professional growth to be expressed – growth that stems from their professional thinking and diagnostic world-view. An examination of the graduates' occupational fields indicates that most of them are involved in teaching. After the course, they take the skills they acquired for diagnosing the pupil with difficulties and apply them in their work by exploring the reasons for and causes of the difficulties in the learning process. They describe this process as one of inquiry and discovery, a process that also engenders a feeling of enhanced communication with the pupil and his family. The result of the process is the ability to devise a work program that is tailored to the pupil's needs, a program that takes into consideration the aggregate of factors that affect the learner and the physical conditions in which he operates. The professional knowledge that they acquired in the course improved several aspects of their work, and they believe that the contents they studied in it must belong to all the teachers.