Teachers' professional identity: an exploratory study with in-service and pre-service teachers.

The aim of this study is to investigate how teachers and trainee-teachers perceive themselves in terms of self-efficacy, with particular regard to some aspects of their professionalism linked to countering the school drop-out rate, such as the ability to involve and motivate pupils and the differentiation of teaching strategies. Secondly, the raining needs of future teachers and in-service teachers are to be monitored over time in order to observe whether and how they change. In order to investigate teachers’ representations, a questionnaire based on an Italian elaboration (Cardarello et al., 2016) of the TsachennenMoran scale, also known as the Ohio scale (TSES 2001), was used in the reduced 12-item version. Approximately 800 anonymous questionnaires were collected (315 teachers, 461 trainees). Initial descriptive analyses showed a perception of medium to medium-low efficacy, with clearer outcomes when using analysis with four factors (Pintus et al, 2021) that distinguishes student-centered and teacher-centered instructional practices. Moreover, the results highlighted a constant training need in assessment strategies for both teachers and traineeteachers and a more positively perceived self-efficacy by teachers with more than 10 years of experience with respect to motivating pupils.