Professionelle Kompetenzen von Lehrpersonen im Kontext des digitalen Wandels

Abstract

Digital transformation has far-reaching impact on economy and society. This also affects the education sector and thus teachers. The aim of this article is to develop and validate by means of self-assessment a framework of teachers’ professional competencies in the context of digital transformation with focus on the commercial domain. The proposed model is based on the concept of professional competence of Baumert and Kunter (2006) and considers elements of Koehler and Mishra (2009), Blomecke (2003) and Carretero et al. (2017). The facets of our framework are: content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, advisory and organizational knowledge (in each case with reference to digital means). Moreover, we add instrumental skills in dealing with digital media and attitudes towards them. A literature review as well as interviews with five school management teams, five focus group discussions with pertinent teachers, and 14 interviews with experts from the education sector in German-speaking Switzerland were utilized to specify these facets on the basis of self-assessment questions. To assess the validity of the framework, 215 teachers at business related schools in German-speaking Switzerland were surveyed. Confirmatory factor analyses generally show good fit values, as do measurement invariance analyses with regard to age, gender and learning opportunities. All constructs can be reliably captured. Our validated framework closes a research gap, as it relates relevant facets of teaching professionalism to the requirements caused by digital transformation, considers the school development in addition to teaching, and integrates instrumental skills as well as attitudes with regard to digital media. The framework should be regarded as a normative model, since it is explicitly oriented not only to current practice, but rather to requirement that may become more important for teachers.