Educators in the focus of a developmental program

Abstract

Early school leaving (ESL) poses a serious challenge for most countries, including Hungary (González-Rodríguez et al., 2019). In line with international ESL trends, the purpose of the Complex Foundation Program is to provide the groundwork of preventive measures that set out to slacken the number of early school leavers, who do not complete an educational program. It also aims to create an adaptive pedagogical culture and to aid the professional development of teachers in accordance with the above mentioned goals. Furthermore, it intends to operate a professional support system for educators. We examined the practices of teaching arrangements of educators participating in the program, their attitude towards the program, the methodological sensitivity of educators, and their strategies of facing the challenges in relation to ESL. Our findings are based on the online opening (N=822) and closing (N=917) surveys for the academic year 2019/2020. In this study we present the results of the quantitative data analysis. The qualitative analysis of the responses to the open-ended questions of the online survey and that of the teacher interviews will be elaborated on extensively in another paper.