The Model for Professional Competence Development of Engineering Teachers at Colleges

The main task for engineering teachers at college is to organize a specific environment that could provide students with creative and professional development. So, the teachers must be well prepared to perform their professional activities effectively and supply their students with essential knowledge and skills, preparing them for innovative engineering activities, diverse paths in their field, and engineers’ leading roles. Therefore, the research aimed to model the college engineering teachers’ professional development process. To achieve the research goal at the first stage, the teachers’ competence composition was clarified based on an analysis of the psychological structure of teachers’ activity and its subject-specific side. For that purpose, 389 respondents (teachers, instructors, managers from public Ukrainian colleges, and employers) were interviewed in 2023. Then, the structural and content model for developing the teacher’s professional competence was designed. The developed pedagogical model reflected and imitated the studied phenomenon's process and specific properties and characteristics. The model could be used in further research devoted to the features of the competence development of an engineering teacher at college to define the process stages, scientifically substantiate the effective technologies and means, and develop diagnostic methods for assessing the levels of teacher’s competence.