This is a study on teacher professional development within the framework of the evaluation of the school development project Swiss Science Education (SWiSE). SWiSE was developed on the idea of German and Austrian projects and comprises a pioneer project in Switzerland. SWiSE aims to foster the transfer of teacher competences into classroom action by means of continuous and learning facilitating further education and individual coaching. Altogether 120 Swiss-German primary and lower-secondary teachers participate in the project. The central question here therefore is: How can practical and individually adapted coaching add to the development and use of professional competences in science teaching?

In science teaching students are supposed to learn in a problem-based and inquiry-based learning (PBL/ IBL) environment where they can autonomously find or construct viable solutions by relying on profound knowledge and discovery. Thus, teachers are supposed to make use of „extensive scaffolding and guidance” (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn, 2007, p. 99; Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006; Savery, 2006) in order to assure students’ learning. On the other hand they may not structure or even restrict learning and hinder discovery by having students reproduce results, which is usually done in lower grades (Möller, Hardy, Jonen, Kleickmann, & Blumberg, 2006; Reiser, 2004; Banchi & Bell, 2008). This may yield a solely declarative knowledge accumulation and can result in a depletion of students’ creative use of knowledge. From a motivational point of view, teachers should foster intrinsic motivation in IPL and PBL and this can easily be derived from Deci and Ryan’s self-deter­mination theory (SDT): „By learning what to do to get rewards and by doing just what the teacher wants, children can become overachievers, but they will fail to develop the capacity to transform their learning into flexible, useful cognitive structures. They will memorize well, but they will not develop their capacity to think creatively“ (Deci & Ryan, 1990, p. 246f.).

Yet, the same is true in ordinary teacher further education. Tacit knowledge and the transfer gap are commonly known and redundant problems in further education. It seems these seminars do not share appropriate instances to overcome these drawbacks. Gerstenmaier & Mandl (2000) summarize that it is not only relevant how knowledge is represented, but also how the knowledge had been acquired before in order to achieve transfer into action (p. 13). This state­ment is in line with SDT and in SWiSE we assume that personal, individually adapted and context-bound support of teachers in a period of three years leads to an easier and smoother implementation of gained knowledge into curricular practice. Context-bound means that support takes place in the schools and is directly connected to the teachers’ current projects. In this setting, teachers’ knowledge acquisition is self-determined and located in an authentic and practical context. This is why we propose a sustainable competence development on a cognitive as well as conative level, and we claim to model competences and transfer with established educational and psychological paradigms.

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