Description

The focus of this project lies within the training procedures of in-service educators. More specifically, the issue at hand is that the training procedures for in-service educators are not always accurate regarding their actual needs, or easy to be organized without taking them out of their classrooms.
 Possible causes for this problem can be attributed to:
 a) Effective training procedures can be applied in small numbers of teachers and small audiences. Thus, training large numbers of educators requires ample time and high costs.
 b) In most occasions, the contents of training procedures are not addressing the actual needs of each educator, but instead they address general topics decided/chosen by ‘external experts’
 c) The majority of educators, even in distant trainings, find it difficult to express and share the feeling of personal difficulties and problems about their educational practices.
 d) Taking early educators out of their classrooms requires substitute teachers something that in turn has increased costs.
 e) At a personal level several educators avoid to participate or participate rarely in training procedures because of limited personal time, family obligations, etc.
 The current project aspires to develop an alternative approach for the professional development of early educators. The project aims to provide to practitioners the methodology and the instruments for self-evaluation and self-improvement with a ‘low cost’ way. To achieve this goal, the project will implement to the educational field an innovative technique named Discrete Choice Modeling (DCM). The DCM is widely used in marketing, biostatistics and other scientific areas, while its use in education is still very sparse. The usefulness of the DCM is that it reveals the real and actual preferences of the responders, by extracting their representations about a topic.

Goals

Objective 1: To develop new evaluation methods, which support the improvement of pedagogical approaches
 Objective 2: To promote early educator’s self-improvement to support the development of teaching skills.
 Objective 3: To enhance the quality and European dimension of in-service teacher training,