Abstract

The study will show that in recent decades we have been witnessing an ever more urgent search for new ways of evaluating the results of innovated teacher training in Czech and foreign universities. While interpreting the changes, we encounter various theoretical, methodological, practical, and research difficulties.

A significant change in teacher education was the transition to a five-year Lower Primary School Teacher Training Master’s study programme, which occurred in recent decades and was the subject of a demanding discussion with the representatives of educational policy in the Czech Republic – see the hearing in the Senate in 2002. It focuses on the preference for teachers’ professional development being for five years. In this paper, we will deal with the chance of teachers’ professional learning from only one perspective, in order to prove the results of the changes based on previous discussions about educational policy. We will observe the student portfolio as a quality tool for the evaluation and self-evaluation of pre-service lower primary teachers during and at the end of their studies. We will analyse the theoretical foundation for choosing portfolios as a tool for observation of professional learning from the point of view of educational science in preparation for the teaching profession in primary education. Reflection on student portfolios may be evidence capturing the individual strategies of students acquiring educational theories from primary education and evaluation of reflection on the results of teaching practice. Teaching practice, together with educational theory, runs through the five-year study programme of Teacher Training for Lower Primary Schools in a new teacher training model in Zlín, at the Faculty of Humanities at Tomas Bata University. This year, the first results of reflection on a recently chosen teacher preparation path are available. Additionally, new and interesting incentives for educational politics in relation to future teacher training in the Czech Republic emerge.