Teachers do have a strong influence on the quality of learning outcomes; therefore quality schools pay close attention to teacher professional development (PD). Several institutions and publications have underlined this idea. As Schleicher puts it “the kind of teaching needed today requires teachers to be high-level knowledge workers who constantly advance their own professional knowledge as well as that of their profession” (2012, p. 11; UNESCO, 2018). In fact, in-service teacher education has been receiving both attention and investment in the international context (Caena, 2014; Comisión Europea, 2018; UNESCO, 2016) and also in the Portuguese context (Andrade, Tomas, Lopes & Costa, 2018; Formosinho, Machado & Mesquita, 2014; Pardal & Martins, 2005; Silva, 2000), in order to promote PD. This paper aims to trace the state of the art on teacher PD practices in the Portuguese Educational System related to a continuing learning process in local contexts (Gonçalves, 2011). Our analysis is based on a broad external evaluation study of in-service teacher education programs of 5 Portuguese Schools’ Association Centres for PD (between March 2017 and July 2018). The analysed data include questionnaires to teachers and teacher trainers, as well as self-assessment reports from the teacher trainers who developed the programs. The study aimed to understand how these programs contributed to teachers’ professional learning, thus potentially promoting the quality of educational environments. The results of the study indicate that both teachers and teacher trainers were satisfied with their professional learning, however they consider that teacher education programs must be longer and have a closer relationship with teaching practices, so that teachers might reconstruct their professional knowledge having in account their students’ needs and their learning outcomes. The conclusions of the study point out to the need of revising the system of in-service teacher education in Portugal towards designing programs i) that involve teachers’ work for a longer period of time, ii) that include the possibility of experimenting and evaluating teacher practice and iii) of monitoring and supervising teachers’ own professional learning having in account their working contexts.

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