Teacher professional knowledge starts to be built before entering the profession and it develops along the teaching practice as experience grows, specially as far as context knowledge is concerned, enabling teachers to build adequate pedagogical and didactic responses. Continuing professional development (CPD) plays a very important role in this growth process, as it creates opportunities for sharing and debating professional experiences that contribute to update, widen and deepen the professional knowledge of their participants aiming at innovation and renewal of practice.

However, several studies have shown that transformative, innovative practices and sustainable professional development are not achieved just with the attendance of workshops, seminars and specific designed programmes of CPD, though these may achieve individual professional learning and often include action research methodologies where the own practice is inquired (DiPaola, 2014; Fullan, 2007; Hargreaves & Fink, 2007; Vieira, Moreira & Peralta, 2014).

Transformative practices and sustainable change are linked with ways of ensuring the continuity and relevance of individual and collective professional learning and exchanges, both within formal and/or informal CPD (Mawhinney, 2010), and also in daily teaching practice, that is, to ensure that the acquired professional knowledge goes beyond immediacy and includes the future action (Hargreaves & Fink, 2007).

Therefore, other ways for continuous teacher education should be sought, namely more flexible ways, suitable to specific educative contexts, which really address teachers’ concerns and needs, enabling self-directed CPD processes and simultaneously empowering teachers, strengthening their professional knowledge and promoting sustainable change within their organisations.

We believe that individual professional knowledge constitutes a potential learning source to explore in spaces of CPD. Thus, it is necessary to invest in designing CPD spaces which connect the working time and growth time (Gonçalves, 2011), creating an interactional dynamics by which the professional community provides resources and times which promote teacher learning and innovation in teaching practices, pursuing the constant improvement of the educational work (DiPaola & Hoy, 2014; Fullan & Hargreaves, 2001).

Recognising the fact that professional knowledge (re)construction and professional development are the result of both individual and collective learning (Gonçalves, 2011), this study is concerned with other possibilities of CPD, namely contexts with the direct and active participation of the teachers, sharing their practices and meaningful teaching experiences.

This study intends to understand how a CPD space designed to explore and enact the formative potential of the constructed professional knowledge and experience can promote individual and collective professional learning, fostering sustainable change within the group and the organisation. In order to ascertain that CPD constitutes a fertile learning ground to foster professional development, the design of this space pays special attention to conditions and practices that improve and encourage professional development. Therefore, a special care with the preparation of the active participation of teachers in the CPD space is crucial. It needs guidance linked to leadership processes (Antunes & Silva, 2015; Fairman et al., 2012; Frost, 2012; Hunzicker, 2012), and regulation by means of supervision procedures (DiPaola & Hoy, 2014).

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