Challenges to the Development of Teachers' Professional Digital Competences - Bulgarian Perspective

The paper presents and analyzes teachers' views and attitudes on their participation in continuous professional development (CPD) training courses and their usefulness for the improvement of digital knowledge and skills which are part of teacher digital competence so much necessary for meeting the educational challenges of the 21st century. The findings discussed in this paper were obtained within a national research project carried out with the support of the Ministry of Education and Science at the end of 2019. The analysis of some of the research findings shows a relatively contradictory picture in terms of the relation between continuous professional development of teachers and the development of teachers' digital competences. On the one hand, a positive tendency is observed related to a very active participation in CPD training of Bulgarian teachers in the field of ICT implementation in the educational context for the past 5 years. On the other hand, the educators themselves give positive but not very high evaluations of the degree to which they have developed basic aspects of their digital competence as a result of the training courses. The way the Bulgarian students evaluate different aspects of their own digital competence developed as a result of the learning experience at school is also not markedly positive. The comparison between the teachers' self-evaluations of their discrete digital competences and the self-evaluations of students regarding their skills for using ICT acquired in the learning process is an adequate research approach through which an authentic idea could be construed about the efficiency of the CPD trainings of educational specialists in the field of digital and technological competence as well as about the existing challenges in this respect in Bulgaria.