In today's fast changing and evolving society, the teacher's professional role is becoming more demanding, the expectations of parents and the general public towards teachers are growing, and the need for teacher monitoring of innovations in different areas of life is growing, it is therefore important that the teacher is constantly learning and taking care of his own professional development. Most definitions of a teacher's professional development highlight the importance of lifelong and experiential learning. Different principles of such development are important in creating favourable conditions to promote the teacher's professional development. What is also important is knowledge of the different models and factors of the teacher's professional development. Professional development depends on several sets of factors, from those relating to the teacher himself (internal factors) to those relating to the school space and climate (external factors). One factor is participation in school projects. School projects usually present a challenge for the teacher, as they are about inducing novelty and encouraging a departure from the usual traditional way of teaching, but they can also work burdensomely and do not encourage the teacher's professional development.
In the theoretical part of the master thesis we described in the student-oriented model of teaching and didactic strategies. In more detail we described project teaching, problem-based teaching, experiential learning and research learning. In defining the teacher's professional development, we first explained the concepts of professionalism, profession and professionalism and explained the need for education and professional development of teachers. We described the models and various factors of professional development of the teacher. A specific chapter was devoted to participation in projects as a factor in the teacher's professional development, in which we defined the definition and formation of the project and the role of the teacher in the project.
The empirical research was conducted in accordance with the quantitative research paradigm on a sample of 100 primary school teachers. With the research we established the importance of participating in school projects for their own professional development, which content and performance characteristics must, in judgement of the teachers, have a project to encourage the teacher's professional development, how much experience teachers have with projects, what is the quality of the expirience and where they see opportunities for improvement. We also wanted to know whether, in judgement of teachers, the experience in the projects influences their organisation of teaching and whether teachers with more experience of participating in projects are more likely to organise project teaching and other didactic open learning strategies. Finally, we researched, whether teachers with different titles, years of service or level of professional satisfaction differ statistically significantly in the assessment of the importance of projects for teacher's professional development.
We found that teachers believe that participation in projects does not have much impact on their professional development. In order to have a greater impact on their professional development, projects should bring a great deal of new knowledge to teachers, involve pupils and allow for more cross-curricular links. They should have well-defined aims and instructions and enable teachers to participate actively and share their experiences. We also found that in the last five years teachers have been most involved in numerous projects at national, school and international level. Teachers think that projects offered are enough. We found that not all projects give teachers much knowledge, as they replied that only certain projects give them knowledge. From the didactic open-learning strategies, most teachers use problem solving and group learning, project teaching is used much less frequently. The results of the quantitative research showed that there are statistically significant differences between teachers with different years of service in terms of assessing the importance of projects for their professional development. In majority, teachers with more years of service have given a higher rating of importance of projects than teachers with fewer years of service. It has also been shown that the different titles and their satisfaction in the profession are not linked to their assessment of the importance of projects for professional development teachers.
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