Lifelong learning is a cornerstone of teacher professionalism, enabling educators to navigate the complexities of a rapidly evolving educational landscape. This paper examines the roles of portfolios, particularly e-portfolios, as tools for fostering reflective practice, professional growth, and the development of competencies across the continuum of teacher education: Initial Teacher Education (ITE), induction, and Continuous Professional Development (CPD). Drawing on established models and recent educational reforms, this position paper examines several critical dimensions that shape the effective implementation of portfolios. Using the Italian education system as a case study, the paper explores how recent reforms and prior experiences can be leveraged to enhance the integration of lifelong portfolios, ensuring continuity and coherence throughout teachers' professional trajectories. Emphasis is placed on the importance of aligning portfolio practices with professional standards, establishing robust training programs, and developing supportive cultural and technological infrastructures. By addressing the opportunities and challenges of embedding portfolios in teacher education, this research contributes to the broader discourse on fostering systemic approaches to professional development and improving the quality of education.

EXPLORATORY SURVEY ON NEWLY RECRUITED TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN TEACHING: STRONG POINTS, OBSTACLES AND PERSPECTIVES Abstract This exploratory study investigates teachers’ perceptions regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, which many studies view as an opportunity to innovate and enhance teaching practices and to support a more inclusive, student-centered approach. The questionnaire «Teachers’ trust in AI-based EdTech» by Nazaretsky et al. (2022) was administered to newly hired teachers and to in-service teachers who serve as mentors to new hires. The aim was to understand how teachers perceive AI and to identify its benefits and challenges in educational settings. For instance, whether AI can be seen as valuable support for personalized learning and classroom management, or whether its use may be hindered by a lack of adequate teacher training. Exploring teachers’ perceptions of AI can serve as a starting point for developing training programs aimed at fostering teachers’ informed engagement with AI in education.

Questo studio introduce un nuovo quadro di standard professionali per gli insegnanti neoassunti in Italia, applicabile per tutti i livelli di istruzione e le varie discipline, con una scala di valutazione delle competenze da 0 (nessuna padronanza) a 4 (livello esperto). Il quadro di riferimento, ora integrato nello strumento del Bilancio delle Competenze, è stato adottato da oltre 44.000 insegnanti per il loro anno di prova a partire dall'anno scolastico 2023/24. L’articolo illustra il processo di sviluppo e validazione del framework, suggerisce un approccio continuo e riflessivo allo sviluppo degli insegnanti basato sull’uso degli standard professionali ed evidenzia il potenziale impatto del framework sulla crescita professionale degli insegnanti in una prospettiva lifelong.

The portfolio can be an effective device to support the professional growth of the teacher. Today there is no online portfolio with a similar rationale that can be used in the various moments of growth from initial teachers’ education to in-service training. The various experiences of the use of the portfolio proceed separately, with a certain fragmentation that makes it difficult to think in terms of lifelong learning. In this contribution, we describe the joint initiative of Indire and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and the University of Macerata, aimed at designing a device to encourage the reflexivity of the teachers, accompanying them throughout the phases of their career. In this paper we discuss the various models of teacher portfolios in order to begin the discussion on a model that can find continuity of experimentation and then application at the national level in the various stages of the teacher’s professional development. Un portfolio lifelong per la professionalità docente Il portfolio può costituire un dispositivo efficace per supportare la crescita professionale del docente. Oggi non esiste un portfolio online con una logica simile che possa essere utilizzato nei vari momenti della crescita dalla formazione iniziale universitaria a quella in servizio. Le varie esperienze d’ uso del portfolio per ora procedono separate, e ciò produce una certa frammentarietà che rende difficoltoso e artificioso ragionare in ottica di lifelong learning. Nel contributo descriviamo l’iniziativa congiunta di Indire e delle Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore e dell’Università di Macerata, orientata a progettare un dispositivo per favorire la riflessività del docente accompagnandolo con continuità nelle fasi della propria carriera. In questo lavoro si discutono i vari modelli di portfolio docente per avviare la discussione su un modello che possa trovare continuità di sperimentazione e poi di applicazione a livello nazionale nei vari stadi dello sviluppo professionale del docente.

The school experiences an ever-growing tension between the separation ofthe disciplinary areas, within which curricula are declined, and the call to addressissues of global interest in relation to the environmental, social, economicand institutional risks of which we perceive the profoundinterconnection nowadays.If on the one hand the need to seek a “new humanism” is recognized, as anapproach to knowledge that has the main goal of supporting peace and happinessamong living beings, on the other it is difficult to identify systemic actionsthat support the transformation of the whole educational system insuch a direction.In this work, we address this issue from the point of view of teachers training,an indisputable pillar of the improvement of each educational system, usinga methodology that makes use of images: the visual analysis methodology.The experience of applying this methodology with more than 1.000 teachersfrom 2017/18 to today during face-to-face training courses mainly conductedin the Tuscany region, led to the following results: 1) the validation and definitionof a method grammar, applied through two main phases (photo-elicitationand native image making); 2) some evidences of the generativepotential of the application of the methodology allowing to approach complexity,reinforce empathy, overcome disciplinary barriers, create documentationdata and, last but not least, engage in action, or trigger contributoryeducational actions for the value creation starting from the various disciplinaryperspectives. The visual analysis methodology can therefore representa valid approach in particular to bring together complex issues thatrequires scientific, creative, interdisciplinary and value-based approaches,allowing to face solastalgia (Albrecht, 2005), the stress engendered by perceivedimpotence in the face of global risks. By training the “heuristic gaze”(Losacco & de Maurissens, 2020) capable of facilitating inter- and intra-generationalalliances, the application of this method can be generalized andextended both in teachers training and in classroom activities.

The 2030 Agenda of the United Nations foresees 17 sustainable development goals articulated in 169 targets to be achieved by 2030. Among these, there is the Goal 4 (Quality Instruction) - in its turn articulated in 10 targets - among which the target 4.7 aims to ensure education for sustainable development and global citizenship for all students. This is target that strongly calls Education as a tool to achieve the other goals within each country. The objective of this study is to inform Italy's position with respect to Indicator 4.7.1 internationally used to monitor the achievement of the target 4.7: To what extent (i) education for global citizenship and (ii) development education sustainable, including gender equality and human rights, are integrated atall levels in: (a) national educational policies; (b) curricula; (c) teacher training; and (d) student assessment. In this work elements (a) and (c) of this indicator relating are analysed with special focus at 2017/18, the first year in which the Education for Sustainable Development strategies were addressed to teachers at system level.

In this paper, we present the preliminary results of the analysis performed on 50,000texts written by the Newly Qualified Teachers to reflect on their practice. The Italian InductionProgramme for NQT includes online activities to be carried out in the E-portfoliomanaged by Indire. As part of the training monitoring with the aim to evaluate our supportand to improve instructional scaffolding to teachers, we analysed teachers’ reflectivewriting mixing a new developed framework for teachers’ reflective writing andNatural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. In providing a case study of a large-scaleanalysis of textual teachers’ data in an institutional setting, this paper wants to contributeto the field of learning analytics. We will describe the context, the characteristics of thedata analysed, how all of this has shaped the analytics design. We will describe its implementationand therefore the procedures, tools and metrics developed to representthe content of the teachers’ reflective writing, and we will try to evaluate if and howthese preliminary results can help us to reach the research goals and to understand thestrengths and weaknesses of different methodologies.

This paper reports first results of a wider study devoted to exploit the potentialities of a NLP-based approach to the analysis of a corpus of reflective writings on teaching activities. We investigate how a wide set of linguistic features allows reconstructing the linguistic profile of the texts written by the Italian teachers and predicting whether are reflective.

Starting from the EC Handbook conditions issued in 2010 (Conditions for successful induction Programs) and from a critical and in-depth reading of the induction governance model in Italy and its quali-quantitative evaluation, this work will attempt to validate or enrich governance principles to be applied to similar implementation contexts. Starting from the governance conditions, recognized as fundamental to an effective induction programme, one of the goals of this work is to understand how the conditions of success have been implemented in the Italian training model and, above all, how they have been characterized with respect to the design of network governance.

Italian Teachers involved in eTwinning show the need to enhance their activity within this community with reference both to individual project design and management and to collaborative activities as active members of a vast international professional community. Starting from this need, a collaboration between the eTwinning Italian Unit and Indire researchers led to a research project consisting of analysing, designing and validating a Competence Balance Sheet including eTwinning teachers’ specific professional profiles in order to provide them with a tool showing their professional improvement and growth. This paper describes the steps that led to the design and validation of the eTwinner Competence Balance Sheet.

This work suggests the need to find a few elements - strategies and dispositifs - that if included in initial training, induction and in-service training, can facilitate the acquisition of a consistent professional vision and improve the processes themselves in a perspective of long life learning, namely that can overcome a clear demarcation between initial and on in-service training.These elements are: 1) paths based on recursion between immersion in workplace and distancing for a reflection on the practices enacted in an educational environment, 2) use of devices that favour recursion between immersion and distancing (analysis of practices, vicariant tools for practices, e-portfolio), 3) triangulation during the path both in the immersion phase and in the distancing of different perspectives thanks to the interaction among researchers, experts and novices. This contribution checks for the presence of the preceding elements in all steps of training and analyzes the results obtained in the direction of strengthening a professionalizing posture in the three steps.

Using a Narrative-based Review approach in this chapter we aim to provide a system perspective on the use of videos in supporting teachers' professional development, with specific regard to professional vision. We first look at the ‘affordances' of video: the capacities that it adds to the toolkits of teacher educators. We then look specifically at evidence for the development of specific abilities related to the professional vision through video: capacity for reflection, noticing and other potential benefits. Later, we focus on how to analyse video so as to develop reflective practice in teachers by presenting meaningful experiences and studies. Lastly, we propose an in-depth view of the possibilities related to collaborative analysis for professional vision development paying specific attention to the more widely used and validated methodologies such as lesson-study, teaching video club, and the dialogic video cycle.

This paper focuses the attention on Teacher Professional Identity and discusses some quantitative and qualitative analysis results on the use and the contents of the device Training Curriculum, which is used in the Teachers’ Portfolio for Newly Qualified Teachers in 2015/2016.The results of analysis allowed to validate the Training Curriculum and to emerge the typologies of experiences and the families of skills that the teachers referred most frequently. The results obtained, with the limits of an impressionistic representation of the various experiential paths and the multifaceted skills baggage with which the 2015/2016 teachers have faced entry into the role, allow us not only to know which families of skills the newly appointed teachers consider to be important for the teacher professional identity but also to get an unprecedented image of the teaching profession in order to better plan targeted training initiatives.

This work suggests the need to find a few elements - strategies and dispositifs - that if included in initial training, induction and in-service training, can facilitate the acquisition of a consistent professional vision and improve the processes themselves in a perspective of long life learning, namely that can overcome a clear demarcation between initial and on in-service training. These elements are: 1) paths based on recursion between immersion in workplace and distancing for a reflection on the practices enacted in an educational environment, 2) use of devices that favour recursion between immersion and distancing (analysis of practices, vicariant tools for practices, e-portfolio), 3) triangulation during the path both in the immersion phase and in the distancing of different perspectives thanks to the interaction among researchers, experts and novices. This contribution checks for the presence of the preceding elements in all steps of training and analyzes the results obtained in the direction of strengthening a professionalizing posture in the three steps.

Italian Teachers involved in eTwinning show the need to enhance their activity within this community with reference both to individual project design and management and to collaborative activities as active members of a vast international professional community.Starting from this need, a collaboration between the eTwinning Italian Unit and Indire researchers led to a research project consisting of analysing, designing and validating a Competence Balance Sheet including eTwinning teachers’ specific professional profiles in order to provide them with a tool showing their professional improvement and growth. This paper describes the steps that led to the design and validation of the eTwinner Competence Balance Sheet.

The concept of teaching competence challenges today pedagogical research in the effort of finding new ways to organize the curriculum and to design learning activities in classrooms. EDOC@WORK3.0 project deals with the need to rethink the dimensions that characterize an educational practice, with specific regard to the dimension of “time”, so as to adapt it in order to favor a differentiation in disciplinary teaching. This project supported teachers in acquiring competencies in new methodologies related to time scheduling and accompanied them in its design and application in their classroom. In this chapter we will present the didactic methodology known as Spaced Learning, inside the theoretical framework of adaptive teaching and allocated time. We will describe the results of the experimentation conducted by the teachers who attended the PON EDOC@WORK3.0 project and the training experience made in such an innovative educational method.

Currently, the ‘time’ variable has taken on the function of instructional and pedagogical innovation catalyst, after representing-over the years-a symbol of democratisation, learning opportunity and instruction quality, able to incorporate themes such as school dropout, personalisation and vocation into learning. Spaced Learning is a teaching methodology useful to quickly seize information in long-term memory based on a particular arrangement of the lesson time that comprises three input sessions and two intervals. Herein we refer to a teachers’ training initiative on Spaced Learning within the programme ‘DocentiInFormAzione’ in the EDOC@WORK3.0 Project in Apulia region in 2015. The training experience aimed at increasing teachers’ competencies in the Spaced Learning method implemented in a context of collaborative reflection and reciprocal enrichment. The intent of the article is to show how a process of rooting of the same culture of innovation, which opens to the discovery (or rediscovery) of effective teaching practices sustained by scientific evidences, can be successfully implemented and to understand how or whether this innovation- based on the particular organisation of instructional time-links learning awareness to learning outcomes.