Conducting a Teacher Professional Development Program in Chile

In January 1998, we directed a two-week laboratory-oriented teacher professional development program, "Curso Experimental de Quimica", for thirty-six high school chemistry teachers in Santiago, Chile. Participants earned a certificate of completion from the University of Chile. Our involvement began in 1996, when we presented a plenary lecture in science education at the XXII Latin American Congress of Chemistry in Concepcion, Chile. In that address, we discussed the philosophy and the operation of the Master of Arts in Chemistry Program1 that we were running in the State of Washington. The response to the presentation was enthusiastic, and eventually Hugo Zunino, the Dean of the School of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Chile, visited us in Pullman to explore the idea of involving us in a teacher development initiative in Santiago.