Mexico has undergone continuous political and educational changes trying to cope with its unsatisfactory educational outcomes (OECD, 2016). In terms of teachers’ professional development, since 2015 five different national strategies for in-service teachers’ training have taken place, responding to different priorities and having no conceptual framework or practical approaches that unified them (INEE, 2018). Besides, most teachers’ training programs in Mexico are not evidence-based, which hinders their potential to improve the educational outcomes. In order to tackle this reality, a collaboration is taking place in Mexico since 2014 between the University of Barcelona, the Brazilian company Natura, and the Mexican NGO Vía Educación, with the aim of transferring to the country the results of the FP6 project INCULD-ED Strategies for inclusion and social cohesion in Europe from education (Flecha, 2015), which identified Successful Educational Actions (SEA) that can be transferred to any context to improve school success and contribute to social cohesion. As part of this collaboration, hundreds of Mexican teachers have participated in an evidence-based training that consists of a 20 hours course taught by specialized personnel who present in detail the scientific bases of SEA, along with examples of schools implementing them. According to the participants, the training has provided them with highly useful theoretical insights and practical tools that are highly useful for improving the educational outcomes of their schools. Similar results have been observed in other Latin-American countries were the SEA are being transferred (Carrion, Gómez, Molina & Ionescu, 2017). As a complementary action aimed to strengthen the in-service training of those teachers, “On the Shoulders of Gigants” Seminars were started in 2018 in Mexico. The Seminars, which were first implemented in Spain (Roca, 2018), consist of monthly gatherings where people who already know the SEA deepen their scientific knowledge in education by reading and debating books of authors like Freire, Bruner or Vygotsky, as well as the findings of the most important international educational research, with the aim of transferring those evidences to their schools. In the Seminars, the teachers improve their professional development while they build new dialogic relationships with people that share similar educational objectives (Aguilar-Ródenas, 2017). According to the participants, this dialogic process of learning has prepared them to better cope with the many barriers and uncertainties that teachers face in our current societies.

Aguilar-Ródenas, C. (2017) La tertulia pedagógica dialógica en el practicum de la formación inicial de maestras y maestros. Revista Iberoamericana de Educación, 73(2), 9–22. Flecha, R. (2015) Successful educational actions for inclusion and social cohesion in Europe. Springer. Garcia- Carrion, R., Gomez, A., Molina, S., & Ionescu, V. (2017) Teacher Education in Schools as Learning Communities: Transforming High-Poverty Schools through Dialogic Learning. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 42(4). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2017v42n4.4 INEE (2018) La educación obligatoria en México. Informe 2018 [The mandatory education in Mexico. Report 2018]. Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación, México. Available at: https://publicaciones.inee.edu.mx/detallePub.action?clave=P1I243 OECD (2016) Results from PISA 2015, Country-specific overview for Mexico. Available at: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-Mexico.pdf Roca, E. (2018) Impacto científico, politico y social de la formación del profesorado basada en actuaciones docentes de éxito: El caso de la tertulia pedagógica “a Hombros de Gigantes” de Valencia” [Scientific, political and social impact of teacher training based on successful training actions: the case of the “On the Shoulders of Giants” seminar of Valencia] (PhD disertation). University of Barcelona, Spain