The Units developed were available for use by teachers and educators in teacher
education programmes (TEP) as exemplar materials showing the range of imple-
mentations and how evidence of learning had been determined in the case studies.
Parallel to the development of the SAILS units, the programme for teacher edu-
cation was also undergoing development.
56.3 Development of Pan-European Teacher Education
Programmes in IBSEA
In recent years, developments in teacher education have been organised under
several conceptual frameworks. These include improving the scientific foundations
of teaching, developing teachers’knowledge and skills alongside providing them
with materials and tools, and preparing teachers for identifying and applying
research results and carrying out teaching experiments to improve their own work.
Many professional development programmes are designed to attempt to change a
teacher’s attitudes and beliefs towards certain methods of teaching or a new cur-
riculum. The presumption is that once a teacher’s attitudes and beliefs have
changed, specific alterations will occur in their classroom practices or behaviour,
leading to improved student learning (Guskey 2002 ). An alternative approach is to
rearrange the processes involved in teacher change. This alternative approach
suggests that a professional development programme should attempt to change the
teachers’classroom practices from the outset. This would then lead to a change in
students’learning outcomes, which would give rise to a change in the teacher’s
beliefs and attitudes towards this new teaching method, material or curricula. The
assumption in this case is that significant change occurs in teachers’attitudes and
beliefs once they have gained evidence of the success of a new approach in the form
of improvements in student learning (Guskey 2002 ). The teacher educators from
across the SAILS collaboration, adopted this assumption in the development of
Teacher Education Programmes (TEP) in inquiry and its assessment. The overall
objective of this collaboration was to increase teacher’s confidence and competence
in adopting inquiry approaches to teaching science and also in assessing the skills
and competences developed by their students in the classroom.
The four-year collaboration between teacher educators participating in the
SAILS project facilitated the continual exchange of ideas and resources between
science teachers and educators. Across the fourteen project teams in twelve
European countries, a diverse range of national systems of education and different
pressures and influences on these systems were highlighted, i.e. traditional
approaches to teaching and learning in science, lack of time to develop and
implement IBSE assessment, high content requirements in national curriculum,
external tests not focused on assessing inquiry skills. An integral aspect in the
development of TEP was to recognise the differences and diversity across the
twelve participating countries and through ongoing discussion and dialogue to
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