Abstract:

Teacher education is a lifelong process due to the characteristics and the nature of its professional reflections and responsibilities. Teachers are among those professionals who need to adopt the latest scientific, technological and socio-cultural development in their occupational practices in order to enable individuals to catch up with the speed of the global changes. Educational authorities in every country aim at introducing effective teacher training programs in order to achieve short term and long term educational objectives in their specific context through seminars, conferences, one shot or continuous training programs, professional visits or exchange programs, and projects. The teacher training program introduced in this study was designed as a project for the English language teachers in Turkey with the support of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. The objective of the six-day training program was to educate high school EFL teachers on how to be of help for the students who have potentials to develop scientific projects and their teachers to overcome their foreign language problems while accessing scientific resources in English. For the study two questionnaires were administered and an observation checklist was used as the tools for data collection. The result of the data analysis showed that the program was effective in several dimensions such as teachers’ professional satisfaction, professional development, motivation, as well as establishing a professional network for future collaboration.

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