According to the Teaching and Learning International Survey (2019), the average age for a teacher, across OECD countries, is 44 years old, and the teacher workforce has aged in a number of countries, over the past 5 to 10 years. Given the demands expected from the contemporary teaching profession, the study of possible implications of ageing on the use of digital technologies in education is even more pertinent and relevant. This study aims to analyse veteran teachers’ perceptions about digital technologies and outline possible pathways for their professional development. Data collected through literature review and content analysis of veteran teachers’ perceptions, expressed in a continuing education training programme, show there are positive and negative thoughts and dilemmas related to the role of digital technology in education, and that there are myths regarding veteran teachers’ digital skills, competences and motivation to change practices, as well as misconceptions about the relationship between technologies and educational reforms. The results also indicate possible pathways to successful training practice with this target group.

Peer observation of teaching has for long been defended as a valuable device of professional and institutional development in higher education, but is almost unexplored at primary- and secondary-level schools. This paper introduces a model for multidisciplinary peer observation of teaching that has been developed and implemented in a professional development programme in two Portuguese school clusters of basic and secondary education in collaboration with its teachers. After four years of developing the programme in these school clusters, a case study was conducted through a qualitative analysis of observation guides completed throughout the years (N = 563) to identify perceived effects of participating in the programme for both teacher professional development and reflective practices. The programme emerged as a powerful initiative to foster teacher collaboration, innovation, and reflection for improving practices. Implications related to current national curriculum and educational policies are discussed.

Teachers’ role in curriculum design is a broad question that inspires political educational reforms among European countries, a trend that even extends to higher education politics. The perspective on teachers’ role in curriculum, both at the level of the policies and of the practices, shapes recent educational reforms in Portugal. These are the concerns underlying our research that intends to substantiate school teachers’ involvement in curriculum development as it is experienced by them, and while comparing their views to the roles they are attributed in the political and academic dominant discourses. To reach teachers’ perceptions, we distributed questionnaires which were completed by 214 teachers in primary and secondary schools. We could conclude that the enactment of a professional identity on the basis of teacher assumption of their role as real curriculum designers is still far from being achieved.

This paper focuses on the issue of how engineering programmes demand and/or promote argumentative reasoning, which is a subsequent aspect of curricular development. This was the main objective of the project on which this paper reports. This is to say that the focus is on assessment as a way to establish to what extent argumentative reasoning is demanded and mobilised in teaching and learning processes. This aim was achieved using a sample of assignments developed in courses in different Bologna undergraduate programmes at the Engineering School at the University of Porto, during the first semester of the academic year 2009/2010. Whereas problem solving in engineering constitutes a structural element in the curricular organisation of the engineering programmes and is strongly related to argumentative skills, it was possible to conclude that students demonstrate and explain extensively, but do not argue, possibly because their teachers do not invite them to do so in assessment situations.