Reflective practice, Competences and Assessment in Initial Teacher Training

Societies of "reflexive modernity" are evolving at a dizzying pace. Technologies change work processes, forms of sociability and connect authors to multiple social fields. For Giddens, knowledge conveyed by expert systems, the contact of individuals with experts from various fields and the dissemination of specialised information by the media have increased exponentially in the "reflexive modernity". This has allowed individuals to gain access to a variety of
enriching experiences regarding their cognitive resources. As a result, the reflexive monitoring of social activity is a distinctive feature of the quotidian of
individuals in contemporary societies.
In constantly changing social contexts, education research has pointed to the need for new conceptual models for teacher training. In this sense, since the eighties, reflexivity (Schön, 1987) has been seen as an essential
component of teaching practice (Schön, 2000), in which the teacher is seen as a professional who plays an active role in the establishment of purposes, objectives and means to achieve in their work, and who researches the
teaching practice inside the classroom, identifies problems, searches and develops intervention projects to solve those same problems, based on professional knowledge arising from their own experience (Zeichner, 1993, 2008).
Reflective practice requires not only the mobilisation of knowledge but also skills, as it appeals to the interaction of the individual’s resources and the resources existing in the environment. In fact, there is a tendency in European
policies for the adoption of professional skills in teacher training courses (Tuning Project, 2000; European Commission, 2012, 2013). In the last fifteen years, a large number of countries have applied frameworks of references reflecting the European effort.
This study aims to identify the skills inherent to initial teacher train
ing courses for the 1st and 2nd cycle of basic education taught at Portuguese higher education institutions as well as how they are assessed and transferred to the training area.