How do teachers evaluate their training on the portuguese language curriculum in basic education?

4th International Conference of New Horizons in Education‐2013 (INTE‐2013), Roma, June 25-27.This century has brought upon significant changes in Portuguese language curriculum in Portugal; one of those was the approval of a new syllabus for basic education (Reis, 2009). In order to help teachers understand the new curricular guidelines and change their teaching and assessment methodologies, the Bureau for Innovation and Curriculum Development organized a training program which involved teachers from the various schools, educational cycles, and regions of Portugal. Some were from the Portuguese Autonomous Regions of Azores, and they became responsible for conducting the training process in the archipelago, under the supervision of the Regional Secretary of Education and a university professor. That training process started in 2009 and it was organized in three phases. Phases one and two lasted from 2009 to 2011. They involved approximately eight dozens of Portuguese language teachers from eight islands of the archipelago and half a dozen of formers. The process included classroom training and distance learning, planning tasks, didactic material construction and experimentation, as well as peer work in schools. The third phase lasted from 2011 to 2013. It was mostly based on peer work in schools, under the supervision of the teachers who participated in the previous phases. This process is now being researched in order to analyze teachers’ representations on its organization, relevance, impact and constraints, as well as on the new curriculum guidelines (changes, adequacy and demands). It uses a mixed methodology based on content analysis on documents produced by the teachers who participated in the training process (portfolios, reports, and didactic sequences) and their testimonies on online forums, as well as on a questionnaire, test results and a study case. We here present some preliminary results on how teachers evaluate the training process based on content analysis on their individual reports.Centro de Investigação em Educação da Universidade do Minho (CIEd)