Teachers’ professional development in São Tomé and Príncipe: a study within the continuing teacher education promoted by the project Escola+, phase II

Abstract

Continuing teacher training in São Tomé and Príncipe is not yet a systematic or compulsory one. It is recognized, however, that this training is essential not only for the updating and deepening of teacher knowledge, but also for filling serious gaps that a significant part of the teaching staff, still not professionally qualified and sometimes not even academically qualified, presents. Thus, in the framework of the Project Escola+, phase II, a set of continuing training programmes was developed for teachers of secondary education (7th to 12th grades), with which it was sought to respond to the specific training needs of this teaching staff, both at the level of knowledge of general didactics and transversal domain of the Portuguese language, as to the specific level of disciplinary contents and their didactics. To identify evidence that these short programmes contributed to the increase of the professional knowledge of the teachers and, consequently, to their professional development, this study, of a qualitative and interpretative nature, is based on a content analysis of 56 training reports, implemented between 2013 and 2016. Through them, we can see that the programmes allowed us to diagnose a series of weaknesses in the areas of content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, curriculum knowledge and evaluation procedures. There is evidence that, particularly in the areas of content knowledge and pedagogy, training has had a positive impact on the professional development of teachers, but there is still a long way to go, full of challenges, to improve performance of teachers at this level of education.