Conference Program

For an equitable, inclusive, and democratic education, teacher development is an indispensable component in equipping educators with the tools necessary to address the challenges of instructional practice with a reflective, critical, and empirical stance. It is well established that, in order to teach effectively, teachers must possess a sophisticated methodological and pedagogical expertise capable of ensuring the quality of instructional design in response to the individual educational needs of their students. This constitutes a core teacher competency — one that enables educators to remain flexible within a framework of reflective professionalism, and to operationalize instruction with a critical mindset, fostering recursive reflection on the outcomes of teaching and the ongoing questioning of one's own practice, in a continuous process of rethinking and improvement that might aptly be described as a Deweyan-inspired disposition. In Italy, teacher education and training remains a highly contested issue, particularly because, to this day, no coherent and comprehensive system exists that effectively integrates both the dimensions more closely tied to career progression and salary structures, and those pertaining to the broader and more complex conception of teacher professionalism — one that moves decisively beyond the reductive view of the teacher as a mere transmitter of knowledge.

This paper reports on an experimental study developed as a follow-up to the previous national survey 'RC-RT' conducted by SApIE, carried out in third-grade primary school classes using the EBID — Evidence-Based Improvement Design methodology (cALVANI, mARZANO, 2020). The study employed a non-probability purposive sampling design, comprising 46 third-grade classes (28 experimental and 18 control) drawn from three Italian regions (Lombardy, Lazio, and Abruzzo), involving a total of 821 students, of whom 510 were enrolled in experimental classes and 311 in control classes. The project engaged teachers in implementing the instructional strategy of Reciprocal Teaching (PalincsAR, bROWN, 1984) from an inclusive perspective, following their participation in a purpose-designed professional development course, in classes that also included students with intellectual disabilities, specific learning disorders (SLD), other specific developmental disorders (SDD), and linguistic and cultural disadvantage. The program yielded substantial learning gains in the experimental classes, including among students with Special Educational Needs (SEN). Specifically, effect sizes (Kraft, 2023)for typically developing students indicated a moderate program effect, corresponding to a three-month learning advantage in the experimental group over the control group across all administered measures: reading comprehension (ES = +0.26), summarizing (ES = +0.21), and vocabulary (ES = +0.22). Students with SEN in the experimental classes demonstrated even more pronounced gains: a five-month advantage in reading comprehension over the control classes (MT Reading Test, ES = +0.38), a six-month gain in lexical enrichment reflecting a high level of effectiveness (Verbal Meaning Test, ES = +0.45), and a seven-month gain in summarizing ability (Summary Writing Test, ES = +0.56)."