Supporting innovation in assessment to change teaching methods: a professional training course

Abstract

On December 4, 2021 the Ministerial Decree 172 (OM172) hits Italian schools like a runaway train. Schools, after the online training (January - March 2021) looked for universities’ help to plan professional development paths. This paper describes two trainings, one carried out by a university professor and a doctoral student and another by an independent trainer from the same research group. To investigate the application of the decree we chose a mixed-methods methodology with questionnaires, focus groups, logbooks, lesson plans, and some semi-structured interviews. The complexity of the subject matter, which brings together aspects already investigated in the literature with others related to the characteristics of change, guided our choice. This paper will present a small part of the research, namely compare the methodological choices of these trainings and present preliminary considerations on how they affected teachers’ attitudes and perspectives toward change.