PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL EMPOWERMENT OF REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER TEACHERS DURING THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

Reflective practitioner teachers should critically review their own work and introduce innovations that should improve everyday educational practice. For this reason, the focus of the research is on the personal and professional empowerment of reflective practitioner teachers during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. 355 teachers from the Republic of Serbia participated. The empirical research used descriptive methods and techniques of scaling and surveying with an instrument specially constructed for the needs of this research - Questionnaire with assessment scale (RP-COV-19). The results show that the most common form of empowerment is attending online seminars, while teachers rarely attended online classes of colleagues from the school where they work and colleagues from other schools. Teachers' perceptions on the use of the Internet in the aspect of personal and professional empowerment are very positive. Teachers generally rate their training and engagement during the pandemic with the highest marks (four and five), while there were no negative marks at all. Reflexivity accompanied by personal and professional empowerment must be given priority by teachers, because in today's process of education, reflective practitioners are considered successful teachers. Keywords: teacher reflective practitioner, professional empowerment, the Covid-19 pandemic, empirical research, improvement of educational practice.