A severe shortage of teachers in physics has been reported across Europe. In Ireland the STEM Education Policy consultation report (2017) stated that this shortage has resulted in school students not having access to specialist physics teachers and high-quality learning experiences. This shortfall of highly-trained teachers of physics is argued to be directly contributing to the deficit of skilled STEM workers required by industry.

Given the recognised shortage of qualified physics teachers, many teaching roles are filled by out-of-field teacher from other science or maths backgrounds. Highlighting this practice, studies have found that 20-30% of physics teachers had not studied physics at university (Price et al., 2019; Cadis, 2017; Banilower, Trygstad, Smith, et al.. 2015). With under-qualifed teachers filling these roles, aspects of specialised knowledge needed to teacher student in effective ways have been shown to be underdeveloped. (Hobbs, Torner et al., 2019; Riordain, Paolucci and Lyons  et al., 2019; Carpendale and Hume, 2019)

Given the highlighted shortfalls in physics education, exploring ways to support the professional development needs of physics teachers, including those out of field teachers, is worthwhile. On way to address this issue according to Ogodo (2017) is to provide targeted in-service professional development to help out-of-field physics teachers to improve their content knowledge and pedagogical skills.

To address the issues outlined in physics education, the Frontiers Erasmus+ project aimed to demonstrate how teachers can be supported in bringing Nobel Prize winning science into the classroom. Following the development of series of educational resources, the project partners ran three international online professional development events. The purpose of these professional development events was to enhance the pedagogical content knowledge of physics teachers, adopting a collaborative community of practice with the support of expert physicists from large-scale research infrastructures.

This study focuses on the participant experience of the Winter e-School event that took place over 6 days between the 29th of January and the 7th of February 2021. To facilitate teachers attending during the normal academic year and to avoid further class disruption, the Winter School took place over 2 weekends with meetings scheduled between both weekends. In total there were 203 participants in flexible attendance, with 30 teachers chosen to participate in workshops groups to develop teaching resources.

This study investigates the effectiveness of the Winter e-School  in developing the pedagogical content knowledge and self-efficacy of physics teachers. Hosted through Zoom, these synchronous online training events targeted science teachers who were motivated to introduce Nobel prize winning physics in their classroom. The events sought to develop the pedagogical content knowledge of physics teachers through the exploration of specially developed inquiry-based learning resources and by supporting teachers to collaboratively development their own resources. Further collaborative teacher workshops were also facilitated with additional support of asynchronous engagement through Google Slides. 

Focusing on the effectiveness of the collaborative online platforms and applications used to deliver the professional development events, this study captures the participant perspective of the event through focus group data.

Data was collected from the online professional development event participants through a focus group. The questions asked of the focus group participants focused on the collaborative elements of the online training event. These included: 1. The collaborative online tools used 2. The collaboration with other teachers 3. The international collaboration of teachers and experts A six-phase model of thematic analysis (Braun et al., 2016) was used to analyse the qualitative data from the focus group. This six phase model included (i). familiarisation, (ii). coding, (iii). theme development, (iv). writing up, (v). naming, (vi). revision. The recording was listened to before transcription to become familiar with the data. Coding was done manually by highlighting words and phrases that were similar with different colour highlighters. The coding phrases were then placed beside quotes to mark them. Themes were then developed by organising the codes into higher level patterns that formed “candidate themes” (Braun et al., 2016, p.200). After the candidate themes were recognised, they were reviewed to make sure they represented the data appropriately and addressed the research question. The themes that emerged were named and placed and formed into a thematic map.

From the focus group findings, the standout element that participants enjoyed and felt that they benefitted from most was the opportunity to collaborate with other teachers who share a passion for physics. This was reflected in the comments of most of the focus group participants. All the participants of the focus group felt that the collaboration with teachers and having the time to work through questions they had to solve in the working groups was beneficial as it would help them prepare for when their own students asked questions. As the International e-Schools were held virtually, online collaborative tools had to be used to facilitate the teacher engaging with the content and each other. This brought about several challenges but also opportunities to work differently yet effectively. Although local internet connection issues for participants were mentioned, several of the collaborative tools employed by the Frontier Project were subject to praise. The use of Zoom to host the live events and sharing of resources by email was functional and accessible to all participants. In the working groups, Google Slides received considerable praise. The organisation of the International e-School was given much praise. Although it was generally felt that participants would have benefitted from having face-to-face engagement, there were a number of benefits to the online nature, including virtual tours of research facilities and collaborating this an international cohort of teachers. One of the main reasons given for taking part in the Winter School by some of the focus group participants, was that they wanted the opportunity to learn from teachers from other countries. Learning about different national physics curriculums was very valuable. Although there were a lot of differences discovered between national curriculums, the teachers found it interesting and exciting working to find common ground.

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