New Perspectives in Science Education

Launched in 2014, for a 3 year duration, Amgen Teach is a European programme funded by the Amgen Foundation with direction and technical assistance provided by European Schoolnet. The programme is designed to deepen student interest and achievement in science by strengthening the ability of life science secondary school teachers to use inquiry based teaching strategies in the classroom. The objective of this multi annual programme is to set up an ambitious training programme, offering Life Science teachers in 10 European countries the possibility to attend face-to-face (F2F) courses of a duration of 2 to 3 days. These face-to-face national courses are complemented by additional activities enabling teachers to exchange ideas and share best practices via face to face international trainings, online distance learning events organised on a transnational basis and online Community of practice. Major outcomes of the training programme should not necessarily consider exclusively the delivery of the training, but also the follow up of these activities. Thus making it possible, to analyse how the training has been implemented within the classes by the teachers who benefitted from the training. But also, within the training providers, who have a major role to play when organising their face-to-face courses. In this context, we believe, as it has been identified many times before [1] that teacher communities have become an indispensable tool, in order to have a community which is active before, during and after the training sessions. In this paper we present the different opportunities the programme [2] offers both to trainings providers and teachers, while measuring the impact these kind of strategies might have on our final target, secondary school students.