This study is conceptually inspired by the paradigm of health promoting schools, highlighting the whole school-based health promotion approach providing an educational setting where individuals’ capacity for healthy learning, working and living are developed within a school culture construed as a social process of individual and community empowerment implying close partnerships with the local community (CBO, 2013; WHO, 1999; Young & Williams, 1989). As Tones and Tilford (2001) mentioned fifteen years ago, despite the growing importance of the whole-school approach to health promotion, schools in many countries continue to focus predominantly on health education initiatives carried out within the formal and informal curricula with initial evaluations largely focused on success in achieving classroom-based health education goals. This has been the situation in many schools in Portugal until now (e.g., Gonçalves & Vilaça, 2013; Vilaça, 2007, 2008) despite the theoretical frameworks of these school projects being based on the main guidelines of the socio-ecological health promoting school paradigm (Green & Tones, 2010), and on the SHE network core values (equity, sustainability, inclusion, empowerment and action competence, and democracy) and pillars (whole school approach to health, participation, school quality, evidence, schools, and communities) (SHE, 2009). In these schools the objectives, methodological approaches and learning outcomes in health promotion are more often focused on classroom health education interventions developed during a limited period of time, with reduced possibilities to develop student/school staff empowerment and action competence.

The World Health Organization (1997, 1999, 2014) has been encouraging European Governments to commit their own Education and Health Ministries to create the necessary national policies to promote health and wellbeing throughout the life of all individuals. In Portugal, the Health Promotion and Education Program (HPEP) emerged in this context in schools in the 1993 - 1994 school year. Since 1993, HPEP has established itself as an instrument of school support, especially in response to their problems and needs in the areas of drug addiction, AIDS, sexuality and personal and social skill development, among other areas of health education. In 1994, Portugal joined the "European Network of Health Promoting Schools" (ENHPS) and in September 1997, Portuguese schools were challenged to join the process of enlarging the ENHPS, according to the following criteria set out in Circular no. 2/97 of the Health Promotion and Education Program: democracy, equity, empowerment and action competence, the school environment, the curriculum, teacher training, success measurement, collaboration, communities and sustainability.

In-service teacher training in health promotion and education emerges in Portugal in this context as a resource for teachers’ professional development and carrier progression (e.g., Lei n. 46/86; Decreto-Lei n.º 22/2014) in order to stimulate and motivate teachers’ lifelong professional and personal development and, to provide rapid career ascent, better quality of teaching performance and other functions in the ambit of education and teaching. In this remarkable evolution of the focus of training and professional teacher development, teacher supervision was “extended to the ambit of in-service teacher training in the workplace [...] and gained collaborative, self-reflexive and self-formative dimensions, while teachers began gaining confidence in the relevance of their professional knowledge and ability to make their voices heard as researchers of their own practices and builders of specific knowledge inherent in their social function" (Alarcão & Tavares 2007, p.15).

Therefore, this paper aims to investigate: i) how Portuguese teacher trainers in health promotion and education understand the key phases for a whole-school approach to becoming and remaining a health promoting school; ii) the school community’s needs and priorities identified in schools which are part of their Training Centre; iii) how they conceptualize self-supervision and peer supervision in the context of the health promoting school approach.

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