Teacher Training and Professional Development in light of the new challenges of the school system

Resumo

Despite the growing importance that governments, educational reform programs and specialists give to the issue of teachers and to the policies aimed at their professional development, we are still far from having the teacher bodies we wish for. In the last decade many countries from Latin America reformed the teacher-training curriculum -both in their contents and in its structure and foundations-, increased the hour load of the plans, and initiated a process of improvement and accreditation of the institutions. Nonetheless, serious problems persist at many levels: at the institutions, at their teams of teachers and at the organization of the teacher training subsystem. This paper intends to identify the main problems that pre service and in service- teacher training presents in the Latin American countries, in the context of changes and new challenges that contemporary schooling poses to the teacher office. For the identification of the problems, four main dimensions are considered: institutional organization, curriculum, the teacher training models, approaches or conceptions; and the profile of the teacher trainers. In the end, and from the overview described, the author raises which are the main challenges for teacher training and professional development of teachers.