Identity and professional development of newly hired teachers: self-assessment of one’s skills and beliefs

Teacher professionalism is characterized by a complex interaction between cultural, pedagogical, social, and specifically didactic competences, the result of an equally complex orchestration of knowledge, skills, beliefs and internal dispositions. Professional identity considered as a set of competences, attitudes and behaviours that refer to a work context is the result of a construction’s process of subjective awareness and responsibility within training and professional contexts. From this perspective, with the aim of developing practices of reflexivity around one’s own professional action, it may be appropriate to support such activities with the use of specific tools, such as self- evaluation questionnaires on some competences of a strategic nature. In this paper we report the results, the analysis and evaluation of Questionnaire of Perception of One’s Own Competences and Convictions (Pellerey & Orio, 2001) conducted as part of the training courses for mentors of newly hired teachers.