by Christina Dias & Maria João Fonseca (University of Porto, Portugal)

Our second round of our Teacher Professional  Development (TPD) course began on October 12, 2016 with a group of 11 in-service biology teachers. The TPD course will run until March 2017.

Similarly to the first round  of our TPD courses, this second round of our TPD training course was also designed for a total of 25 hours, distributed as follows: 15 hours corresponding to a set of five, face-to-face, classroom meetings and 10 hours of individual, distance learning sessions. At this moment, teachers are preparing their individual projects, which will be implemented in their classes beginning January 2017.

A highlight of this second round of TPD are the classroom interventions of three Carolina Michaëlis Secondary School teachers, who attended the first round  of our TPD course and who are now improving the activity they developed last year. This endeavor follows the presentation of their previous SSIBL activity “Assessment of Toxicity of some drugs in Daphnia magna” to the course participants in the second session of the  TPD course. This sharing experience was designed with the purpose of empowering the participants to take hold of the educational opportunities naturally occurring in their common practices. Furthermore, it makes participants feel comfortable with the development or adaptation of activities according to the SSIBL framework.