Teacher effectiveness is one of the crucial factors that impact learning outcomes (Hattie, 2012). In other words, teacher professional knowledge makes a difference. The point is to better understand the means that are effective in spurring and sustaining teachers’ professional knowledge growth.

  Teacher professional development is understood as the transformation of teacher professional knowledge upon a continuous process that depends on the repertoire of actions that are available within the community, on the social context in which teaching is performed, and on the artefacts and resources that exist in the environment (Grangeat & Hudson, 2015). Accordingly, teacher professional knowledge is a continuous process for meeting the requirements in a particular situated context in which it is applied. This process is drawn on three sources of interactions. First, teachers interact with the educational community (teacher groups, heads of school, parents, educators from museums, libraries, scientific centers, etc.). Second, they interact with educational material and technology provided by the worldwide context or teacher education programmes. Third, they interact with students in the classroom.  This paper values the interactions within the teaching community.

  The engine of teacher knowledge professional development is a crucial issue. Fischer and Boreham (2004) show that new professional knowledge results either from collective exchanges through the work team, or from education when the programme includes professional problem-solving activities. Two levels of knowledge need to be considered since a large amount of professional knowledge is and remains tacit. Tacit knowledge results from individual experience and involves factors that are difficult to reach, such as personal belief, perspective and value system (Batatia, Hakkarainen, & Morch, 2012). Conversely, explicit knowledge that is easy to express formally articulates the reasons that reside behind common practices.  

  Specific educational programmes based on collaboration may transform individual tacit knowledge into partly explicit knowledge that might be shared by the community. This set of explicit knowledge is the fundament of a renewed repertoire of actions that might underpin more efficient practices. Within the science education domain, research meets the same results and of seeing professional knowledge development from the point of view of the actors involved, taking the extent of their repertoire of actions and capabilities into account (Grangeat & Gray, 2007). This paper considers teachers who are involved in different types of collective settings that are expected to spur the process of professional knowledge elucidation in different ways: teacher education programmes based on controversy, teacher team dedicated to design teacher development programmes, and teachers involved in a series of lesson studies that leads them to exchange their perspectives and content knowledge.

  Teachers activity is transformed by both the tools and artefacts that are available and the social context. This leads to emphasising the role of the concrete context and of the community on professional learning. Addressing this question, this paper considers professional development as a combination of individual and situated learning: each teacher finally learns in an individual way, but cannot learn without relying on colleagues and other partners, even if the social environment in which a teacher is acting may also limit teachers’ development.

      There is a consensus on thinking that teacher professional knowledge improves depending on teacher experience, and can be strengthened through teacher professional development or other interventions. The questions are: How can we identify the type of professional knowledge elaborated by teachers? To what extent might teacher collaboration vs. length of experience underpin the development of their professional knowledge?

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