Almost ten years ago system of continuous professional development of teachers has been introduced in Serbia. The main idea was to improve teachers’ professional competencies and, consequently, to improve quality, equity and efficiency of pre-university education. According to the legislation, duty of every teacher is to have at least 120 hours of professional training in the period of five years. Accordingly, in one school year, 80000 primary and high school teachers spend on average 24 hours on different trainings that should contribute development of their professional competencies. This calls for a significant resource investment, both human and material. At the moment there are no instruments or means that could evaluate whether this system functions as it was intended and how effective are the professional development programs. Therefore, the goals of this study were to analyse the ways in which effects of programs for professional development of teachers (PPDT) are evaluated in other EU countries and to develop methodological framework that would enable this assessment in Serbia.

System of continuous professional development of teachers in Serbia is facing some challenges. One of the main issues is that there is no objective assessment of the effects of programs of professional development. In other words there is no way to evaluate whether teachers benefit from participating these programmes, does it have the effect on their practices and consequently whether it has the effect on the student learning and achievement, which should be the ultimate goal of professional development. The only institutionalized assessment of the quality of conducted PPDT relies exclusively on teachers’ evaluation, anonymous questionnaires that are the same for all programmes and that participants of PPDT fill in at the end of the seminar. However, as TALIS study has shown, teachers tend to overestimate the implementation immediately after training, which can lead to overoptimistic evaluation of program effects (OECD, 2014).

The experience of EU countries indicates that assessment the effects of professional development has been identified as a priority matter. The school autonomy is greater than in Serbian system, as well as the accountability for the work quality, and special attention is paid to the development of human resources and monitoring methodologies. Moreover, the process of monitoring and evaluation is also the process of learning, hence most countries include it as the main instrument for examination, collaborative evaluation and various forms of data collection in which teachers who are evaluated are also the holders of the evaluation process. Finally, developing teachers’ capacities for this type of process is itself a sort of professional development and training teachers to be reflective practitioners.

The research papers and studies on methodology for evaluation the effects of PPDT (Hattie, 2009; Guskey, 2000; Frechtling, Sharp, Carey, & Vaden-Kiernan, 1995; Desimone, 2009; Borko, 2004) suggested four main categories of methodological solutions: evaluation questionnaires; classroom observations; student achievement; and experiments.For each of the category suggested usages as well as the limitations were identified. The general recommendation found in analyzed literature is to monitor the effects of seminars combining the methods that provide tracking of individual and group changes.  Diversity of methods provides more objective, reliable and valid information and enables acquiring complete insight into the professional development of teachers.

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