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Teaching skills development in the Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas ESPE - Ecuador

Abstract:

The globalization of technologies, the knowledge society, and the different socio-economic environments have forced to develop several structural changes in Higher Education, which has led to face new challenges in teacher education so that educators can develop some competences like "learning to learn", "learning to research", "learning to teach", "learning to unlearn", and so forth. This research was sponsored by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AECID). The project called "Design and implementation of innovative teaching-learning activities for the development of teaching competences" aims to determine the actual situation that the teachers from the Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas - ESPE can have in regard to the management of the competences based on some aspects like the different areas of knowledge, years of experience, level of instruction among others, through the data collection in 208 teachers. The ordering of the 12 competences considered in this project: Planning, Research Methodology, Communication, Innovation, Motivation, Evaluation, Tutoring, Media Integration, Teacher professional identity, Institutional belonging, and Interculturalism, reveals that the most important competence for teachers is the one that deals with planning, and that the least important one is related to Interculturalism. It is also evidenced a high level of correlation (99.5%) between the methodology and the evaluation based on teaching professional identity. The differences in the level of importance of competences among the different variables (years of teaching experience, area of knowledge, age, and so forth) are also analyzed. Based on the foregoing, it is expected that these results will become a diagnosis that will allow teachers not only to develop different innovative activities in the teaching - learning process, but also to foster a culture of educational research and innovation, in order to develop and/or strengthen the teachers' competences at Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas - ESPE.