Over the last decade, Amgen Teach has stood out as a differentiating programme that answered the training needs of life science teachers in Europe through an Inquiry Based Science Education (IBSE) approach. The Amgen Foundation in association with European Schoolnet set up this ambitious training programme, offering life science teachers the opportunity to attend face-to-face (F2F) in country courses, complemented by additional online activities that supported knowledge exchange via an online Community of Practice and Distance Learning Events, organized on a transnational basis.  

The programme enabled teachers to share best practices at a national and transnational level across 10 countries (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey). We are proud of the legacy of Amgen Teach and its contribution to inquiry-based science education in Europe. The programme has achieved the goals set out when it was first piloted in 2011 and officially launched in 2014. Thanks to Amgen Teach, over 6,500 science instructors across Europe have benefitted from professional inquiry-based training, helping to transform the classroom experience for an estimated 550,000 students.

 
Amgen Teach also provided opportunities for teachers to participate in workshops in the Future Classroom Lab in Brussels and in the first online courses for life science teachers in 2018 (Inquiry Based Teaching in Life Sciences MOOC) with over 1,000 registrations from 44 countries. We estimate that the Amgen Teach MOOC alone impacted indirectly over 17,000 students. Furthermore, Amgen Teach has collected over 400 interesting and useful Resources on a variety of topics related to Inquiry Based Teaching in a collection of different languages. Over the coming years, these will be integrated into other science education platforms, such as Scientix (hyperlink this). Importantly, we have worked to capture learning from the program, which will be used to share best practices and inform other STEM programming efforts. Please find a report available here.

Both the Amgen Foundation and European Schoolnet would like to say a big thank you to all the actors involved in Amgen Teach. We would like to especially thank the participating teachers, the Amgen Teach training partners in each country and the Amgen Teach Ambassadors for their sterling work. The Amgen Foundation continues to invest in science education in the region supporting programmes such as the Amgen Biotech Experience, Amgen Scholars, LabXchange and Khan Academy.