Designing a Teacher's Horizontal Career based on Additional Types of Pedagogical Activities and Professional Achievements: Russian and International Experiences

The relevance of developing approaches to the formation of organizational and regulatory conditions for teachers’ professional careers is determined by the goals of implementing the Russian Federal project Teacher of the Future and the necessity to provide the quality of Russian education by improving teachers’ professional competence. The aim of the present study is to develop a model of a teacher’s career based on the institutionalization of the professional roles of “mentor” and “methodologist” as additional types of pedagogical acti- vities and professional achievements. The official concept of the National Teacher Growth System (NTGS) was based in different periods on the research of different scholar teams that proposed the formation of a vertical teacher’s career by introducing from two to five new positions, and has changed several times in recent years, but has not been implemented. Based on the analysis and theoretical comprehension of Russian and international practices of stimulating the professional growth of teachers, a project of a diversified professional career trajectory in relation to the teacher’s position (horizontal career) is proposed; framework requirements for the amount and quality of additional types of pedagogical activities are identified for their differentiated assessment at each stage of a teacher’s career. The proposed model can be used as an intermediate one and developed at the next stages of the implementation of the federal project Teacher of the Future towards the introduction of new positions, new qualification categories, new opportunities to form teachers’ professional growth trajectories for career-building and professional development.