Teaching professional identity of candidates for secondary school teachers

Within the line of investigation over teacher's thinking, we show with this paper the results obtained from a research which aim was to explore the ideas and motivation of future secondary school teachers towards the teacher profession and the pedagogic training needed for being teacher in this educational stage. Through the Questionnaire about interest to teaching and initial training (Pontes, Ariza y Sanchez, 2010) we have explored the opinions of 353 students of the course of initial training for teachers, comprising a quarter of the students of the past two courses of the University of Cordoba and being the last students of the CAP and the first of the Master degree. Among the results we have found that professional interests towards teaching obey to different reasons and that these reasons are related to diverse prior conceptions about the teacher profession and its training. The results obtained contribute to the advance of the investigation about initial development of the teaching professional identity of training teachers and provide with some keys for the improvement of the initial training process of the secondary school teachers.