Conference Program

The growing emphasis on competence-based approaches has increased pressure on education systems to translate European key competences into curricula and everyday practices (Council of the European Union, 2018). This shift calls for effective forms of Teacher Professional Development (TPD) that can support teachers’ engagement with competence-based education.

TPD is widely recognised as a key lever for fostering innovation and improving teaching quality (Council of the European Union, 2014; OECD, 2019). However, the “impact” in TPD is frequently conceptualised as a linear and measurable effect on teachers’ knowledge or classroom behaviour, overlooking the situated, mediated, and context-dependent nature of professional learning (Opfer & Pedder, 2011).

Building on the assumption that teachers’ professional development is shaped by multiple professional and personal experiences, this contribution explores the potential impact of SCAFFOLD on teachers’ ability to design learning activities for competence-based education.

SCAFFOLD is a card-based tool developed by the European Training Foundation with the Joint Research Centre and grounded in research operationalising the European key competences for educational design (Bacigalupo, 2022). It is intended to support teachers in designing competence-oriented learning experiences characterised by learners’ active engagement with real-world problems (Bacigalupo et al., 2024).

This paper presents the research design and preliminary results of the ongoing Italian adaptation and experimentation, promoted by Fondazione per la Scuola, INDIRE, and the University of Bologna.

The study addresses three research questions: (1) whether the use of SCAFFOLD can foster teachers’ knowledge of transversal competences, their awareness of their relevance, and their design practices; (2) which factors facilitate or hinder the adoption of the cards; (3) whether design practices initially supported by SCAFFOLD can evolve into autonomous design competences over time.

The study adopts an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). An initial qualitative phase, based on semi-structured observations of a SCAFFOLD workshop involving 18 teachers, informed the formulation of the research questions and the subsequent quantitative, questionnaire-based experimentation. A further qualitative phase (interviews and focus groups) will deepen the quantitative findings and reconstruct differentiated teacher profiles and patterns of adoption.

The quantitative phase relies on pre- and post-questionnaires and adopts a hybrid design. For teachers who complete both questionnaires, it takes the form of a quasi-experimental non-equivalent groups design, comparing teachers who attended a dedicated webinar with teachers who completed the pre-test but did not attend it. For teachers entering only at the post-test stage, it takes the form of a post-test-only pre-experimental design (Cohen et al., 1980/2018). The questionnaires investigate teachers’ profiles, familiarity with competence frameworks, the importance they attribute to key competences, and self-perceived readiness for competence-based design and assessment; the post-test also explores modes of use, perceived usefulness, and facilitators and barriers to adoption. At the time of writing, the study is ongoing; however, the pre-test questionnaire has already collected approximately 800 responses.

In conclusion, the experimentation contributes to the debate on TPD by investigating impact not only in terms of observable effects, but also in relation to the conditions, practices, and trajectories through which professional learning takes shape.