Continuing professional development and in-service training for teachers is essential for the improvement of their educational tasks. As the European Commission states (2013) Member States need their teachers to be able to deploy appropriately all the competences necessary to be effective in the classroom and school. Both contents and pedagogical approaches used in continuing development experiences are important to contribute to this goal. Regrettably, in centres with low socioeconomic status students and high rates of school failure, some of the teachers admit defeat and try to survive to the day-to-day. Other teachers continue trying to do something that overcomes the problematic situation (Jaussi, 2012). But in those contexts it is necessary to wonder if the educational actions they are applying are the adequate to overcome school failure. It is necessary to think in what theories and practices are underpinning their educational practices and if those educational practices have been successful before and/or in other contexts. At this point, programmes and strategies for teaching professional development are essential to provide the relevant educational theories and successful practices that really make the teachers reflect, debate about how to implement them in their centre and ultimately producing educational improvement.

University lecturers used to be those responsible of developing both initial training and continuing professional development of teachers. In this sense the university teachers are responsible of providing a scientific quality teacher education that provides skills to overcome school failure and to improve educational practices. University teachers have to develop a Training Education programme with essential contents through an adequate pedagogical approach. 

At this point we have the hypothesis that teaching education and teaching professional development can fail in relation to contents and in relation to pedagogical approach. This occurs on the one hand, when the contents are neither useful nor relevant. It is to say that the contents do not contribute to improve educational practices, teacher training. On other hand, it may happen when pedagogical approach do not produce transformation. It is to say when pedagogical approach follows a “banking model” in terms from Freire (2006) instead of a critical thinking and reflection on scientific based theories that promote transformation.

But, there are experiences in teacher professional development where the qualities of contents are relevant for educational practices and where the pedagogical approach promotes reflection and critical thinking. In this paper, we present the analysis of two experiences of Teacher Professional Development based in dialogic learning (Flecha, 2002). 

European Commission (2013) Supporting teacher competence development for better learning outcomes. Retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/school/teacher-training_en.htm Flecha, R. (2000): Sharing Words. Lanham, M.D: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (2006). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary ed. New York: Continuum. Gómez, A.; Puigvert, L.; and Flecha, R. (2011) Qualitative Inquiry, 17(3), p. 235 –245 Jaussi, ML (2012). La formación del profesorado. Periódico Escuela. Octubre 2012, 1, p. 1-4 Ríos, O., Herrero, C. & Rodríguez, H. (2013). From Access to Education. The Revolutionary Transformation of Schools as Learning Communities. International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(2): 239-253