The professional development portfolio of the Faculty of Education of the University of Malta in how to train language teacher trainers

Abstract

The Professional Development Portfolio (PDP) presented in these pages, as developed by Mario Pace and Joe Navarro, is currently being offered to University of Malta B.Ed. (Hons) students who will graduate as teachers of Italian as a foreign language. It can easily be developed for all other teachers and future teachers of native languages and foreign languages. The PDP sessions with student teachers usually consist of tutorials spread over the third and fourth year of the B.Ed. (Hons.) course, and are intended to be interactive forums in which concerns, successes and achievements can be discussed and shared. The teacher trainer guides his group of student teachers to write reflectively about aspects of their professional development as teachers, and requires them to collect artefacts that will provide evidence of the skills they have acquired especially during their Teaching Practice experience. Towards the end of the final year, the student teacher actually develops and presents his or her final draft of the PDP document, providing evidence of his or her practice, thought and reflection that shows the process of growth and development from a prospective teacher to a reflective practitioner. This should enable the student teacher to come to know him or herself as an individual as well as a professional teacher.