Teacher's role in designing the competency model of professional development
Authors: Đurić Igor , Stanojević Vladimir 
Published: April 2022

Professional development of teachers can be viewed as a heterotopia of simultaneous presence of different schools of opinion on teachers' professional competence. The underlying premise of this research is that professional development can simultaneously rely on various theoretical approaches, with boundaries between individual forms of teacher education being fluid, without the existence of a single view of the teaching profession that is regarded as fixed, unique, and correct. Alternative research paradigms and diverse schools of thought have not resulted in a single theory of teachers' professional development that would be applicable in all educational systems. One of the solutions is for teachers to get involved, create, and adapt professional development programs to their needs, and to the needs of the institution, community, and the context of authentic school discourse. Teacher competence and professional identity explicitly require the involvement of teachers in the exchange of ideas (practitioner's voice), taking into account the context in which they work and their experience, promoting reflexivity and research approach, balancing individual and community interests, and the like. One of the solutions pointed out in this paper is to emphasize the importance of the philosophy of professional development and the role of teachers in relation to this metalevel of the pedeutological field of pedagogy. The metalevel of the pedeutological field of pedagogy, shaped in the form of a defining philosophical opinion on teachers' professional development, in which teachers become one of the factors in creating and implementing alternative schools of opinion on teacher education, can have two effects: (1) directly affect professional development of teacher competencies; and also (2) indirectly influence the improvement of educational practice. This separate type of teacher competence can be an important factor in teachers' professional development, but also a significant component of the quality of the educational process that is realized in schools. The metalevel of professional development of teachers, if regarded as a known and recognized concept to be used in professional education of teachers (both pre-service and in-service), could also have certain effects on teacher personal development lying at the basis of professional development: satisfying the need for belonging and recognition-awareness of teachers that they are an important part of their community and that their activities have a purpose and meaningdeveloping internal motivation and a positive attitude towards the profession, developing self-confidence and a feeling of being professionally autonomous and able to predict the consequences of their own decisions and to critically evaluate and self-evaluate their own work, and also to constructively participate in the processes of joint evaluation with other stakeholders of teachers' professional development. This approach to professional competencies and teachers' professional development needs to be empirically verified so that its possible contributions in authentic (diverse) educational contexts can be determined.