A review of domestic and foreign scientific literature indicates an increase in interest of researching teachers' occupational activity, their professional development and professionalization of teaching. Questions, whether teaching is profession, or are there any elements missing, for this occupation to be defined as profession, or what has been or should be changed, have also been exposed.
Medicine and law are traditionally labelled as professions; the general approach was to identify the characteristics of these professions and to compare other occupations with them. Different models of professions have been formed. An important role has also been given to the research of different factors of teachers' professional development. The researchers have been interested in how the teachers’ researching and cooperating in projects, means and types of education, means of innovating, and institutional climate affect teachers' professional development. In theoretical part, we defined the teaching occupation and teachers’ occupational roles. We defined the term profession, professionalism, professionalization and professional development. We presented the models of professional development and analysed the factors that affect teachers’ professional development. In empirical part, we were interested in how different groups perceive teaching occupation. For the purpose of the research, we formed a questionnaire for practitioners in education (teachers, headmasters and headmistresses), parents and students. Our interest was to find out how they perceive different positions of teaching occupation (difficulty of occupation, required education, specificity and irreplaceability…). We compared views of different groups of respondents to teaching occupation and explored, if there were any statistically important differences between them. We also researched the amount of influence of different factors on teachers’ professional development, according to teachers’ and headmasters’ opinions. The results of our research have shown that the teachers, headmasters, parents and students would classify teaching occupation as profession. Teachers and headmasters believe that internal factors affect teachers’ professional development more than external factors. According to their opinion, the highest influence on professionalization of teaching occupation is teachers’ high professional qualification. There have been different opinions on factors or competences, defining teaching occupation, with teachers and headmasters on one side and parents and students on the other. Within factors that affect the reputation of teaching occupation, headmasters, teachers, parents and students have completely agreed that teaching is an important social function. With our research, we wanted to discover and critically define the factors that affect teachers’ occupational work and evaluate their influence on professionalization of teaching occupation. Our purpose has also been to inform primary school teachers, as well as general public, about the importance of realizing the factors that help to improve the enforcement and recognition of the profession.
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