Research based activities in teacher professional development on optics

The aim of this research is to understand how teachers take ownership of content given them in formative intervention modules and transform it into suggestions and materials for teaching. To this end a module on optics was designed for a group of kindergarten, primary and lower secondary school teachers which sought to integrate meta-cultural, experiential and situated approaches with various context specific factors. The study investigated how teachers deal with conceptual difficulties in the module and how they adapt it to their school situations with data being gathered through a variety of tools. It emerged that the most difficult concepts teachers encountered at the formative stage were those they most often incorporated into their materials. The steps taken in this process of appropriation were then reviewed via a collaborative discussion among the teachers themselves on the materials they had produced.