Who am I? Where am I Going? And which Path should I Choose? Developing the Personal and Professional Identity of Student-Teachers

Batia Riechman

Abstract


The formation of a professional identity is an important stage in the teacher’s professional development.  The process of professional identity construction begins with teacher training studies.  As part of the learning program in the first year of an academic college training process, the college offered a course entitled “Personal Professional Identityâ€.  The present study investigated student-teachers’ attitudes, at different training stages, concerning the contribution of their occupation with “personal professional identity†to the construction of their professional identity as future teachers. The study employed mixed methods research, using both quantitative and qualitative data-collection tools. Findings indicated that in the first and second years student-teachers gave greater weight to the contribution of different aspects in the course for the construction of their identity, in comparison to students at the end of their training who tended to minimize the contribution of the course. The paper suggests possible explanations for the emergent findings and recommends possible ways to enable the process of personal professional identity building of the trainee teacher over the years of training.


Keywords


Construction of personal/professional identity, teachers’ professional identity, teacher-training, student-teachers

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References


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