IN-SERVICE TRAINING
FOR PHYSICS SECONDARY-SCHOOL TEACHERS INTEGRATED TO SYLLABUS AND CLASSROOM EXPERIMENTATION and SUPPORTED BY COMPUTER AND NETWORK ACTIVITIES

FISISS Collaboration (Universities of: Ferrara, Milano, Modena, Napoli, Padova, Palermo, Pavia, Torino, Udine)

coordinated by P.Guidoni
University of Naples, Via Mezzocannone 16, 80133 Napoli, Italy
tel & fax: + 39-81-5526837 e-mail: guidoni@na.infn.it

The communication will discuss aims, methods and structure of the 3-year National FISISS Project, near the end of its first year of implementation.

The main aims characterizing the Project are:

• to construct and to validate a model for in-service training of post-primary, physics school teachers; the model will be centered on emblematic themes, and differentiated according to three levels of students' competence in physics ("basic" physics, at middle school level; "classical" physics, at middle and higher secondary level; "modern" physics, at the end of secondary school);
• to explicitely face, in the process of model construction and within the model itself, both content and teaching optimization problems;
• to finally produce emblematic materials, both for teachers and for students, able to support dissemination and autonomous development of the proposed teaching-and-formation approach;
• to adjust the project , along the three years of its implementation, to the ongoing process which in Italy is now redefining at a nationwide level the school organization, the structure of curricula and syllabuses and the teachers' training criteria, at all pre-university levels.
  

The methodology adopted by the Project is best characterized by:

• strict integration, within the proposed model for in-service training, between: cultural reassessment of the disciplinary argument; classroom and laboratory practice; emphasis on pupils' cognitive dynamics and on interface with common-sense knowledge; syllabus adjustment to classroom dynamics; etc;
• use of informatic technologies in various "modes", at all school levels (from on-line transduction integrated to laboratory practice to suitable formal modelling; from multiple representation of data to network communication with others - teachers and students - involved in the same problem; from multimediality to "project" learning; etc); this taking into account the critical situation of laboratory practice in most of the italian schools, and the correlated risk of a direct replacing of laboratory itself by "multimedia" activities;
• operative sub-structuring of the Project into three "experiments", corresponding to the three mentioned main school levels: by this way the research will be able to better define specific contents and methods, while keeping track of a strong concern for "longitudinal" coherence of the proposed mainlines for cultural formation.
  

The FISISS Project is working in strict collaboration and mutual shaping of intervention strategies with another National Project (TIDIFI - coordinated by G.Vegni, Univ. of Milano) centered on the development of computer supported materials and tools for Physics education and formation.

The communication will be centered:

1. on the different approaches assumed for the first year of implementation by the three "experiments", and on their impact both on typical (initially very small) school situations, and on apriori beliefs and expectations of researchers;
2. on the main implications of the assumed approach versus the general trends of research in Physics teaching-learning-understanding.