Assessment of Personal Professional Theories

Vocational education lays the foundations of PPTs, which continue to take shapeduring practitioners’ professional careers, often in interaction with CPTs. Knowledge of PPTs is important in vocational education because PPTs reflect how students have internalisedand integrated what they have learned in school and in practice during internships.If the main features of student’s PPTs could be made visible, they could provideteachers with information on the student’s knowledge of and views on the professionthey are learning. As important aspects such as its priorities, awareness of professionalissues, cohesion and the connection between experience and theory becomeexplicit, teachers could advise students regarding their development. This means thatteachers could use students’ PPTs for formative assessments of student development.Such assessments could also help them to personalise their teaching by better designingfuture learning experiences. An example is teacher education, where it is important thatstudent teachers realise that their content knowledge, the pedagogies they employ, andthe ways they manage their classrooms, must be aimed at effective child development.If knowing that, in a student’s PPT, child development is only weakly connected withsuch items, this could give rise to the teacher organising a traineeship (i.e., a studentteacherexperience) which is more focused on child development.