Professional Development of Teachers Across the COVID-19 Pandemic: the EGU Geoscience Education Field Officer Programme in Italy

Since its launch in 2019 and despite the forced interruption in 2020-2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the GEFO (Geoscience Education Field Officer) programme has undergone an appreciable growth from the first 6 teachers' trainers, mostly from European countries to the current 19 trainers operating in 18 countries of 4 continents. In this period the Italian GEFO has run 19 workshops attended by around 300 teachers, 291 of which filled in an evaluation form. The collected data provide very positive feedback from the teachers, who expressed high personal interest (mean 4.81 on a 5-point Likert scale with 5 being the highest score), professional interest (mean 4.70/5), and willingness to attend further workshops (mean 4.75/5) on Earth science topics and beyond. Despite their short duration, (one 2-2.5 hours intervention) GEFO workshops run in Italy seem to have achieved the same positive outcome as the ESEU (Earth Science Education Unit) workshops run in the UK since 1999 and, more recently, of the GEFO workshops run in different countries (France, India, Portugal and Spain).