“INFN Program for Teachers”. Dubbed PID (Programma INFN per Docenti), it is a residential professional development course aimed at high school teachers. In Italy INFN runs four different National Laboratories and jointly -with French CNRS and Dutch NIKHEF- operates the European Gravitational Observatory that can host such a course. Each lab organizes its own PID-course that lasts from Monday to Friday for a total of 40 hours and includes both lectures and hands-on research activities. The lectures focus on the research conducted at the host facility, the hands-on activities are directly derived from daily work (therefore are not traditional teaching labs) and are structured so that participants, in collaboration with our staff, can perform the required measurements. This format limits the number of attendees to less than thirty per course. Selection starts with a national open call, advertised on social and using mailing lists, and attendees are chosen on the basis of the information they provide (motivation, activities in the classroom etc.), with an effort to maximize the number of regions represented. The number of applications is several times (a factor 3-4 is typical) over the number of available positions. Participants are not allowed to go to the same laboratory twice but can apply for a different one. We avoid having two people from the same school attending the same course. Thanks to the cutting-edge research being performed in the host lab, this program provides an opportunity to improve attendees' knowledge, something very important in a field that is quickly changing.

The program started in 2018 and, despite the COVID19 break, overall, we delivered a total of 360 courses to 260 participants. We carry out a survey at the end of the week, to gather immediate feedback, and one at the end of the school year to collect information on if (and how) the course impacted the classroom activities, as well as the didactic planning. This is crucial as, by design, the translation of the PID experience in didactic activity is left to the creativity and skills of the HST.

We also will present evidence that embedding teachers in research environment also foster the creation of informal networks useful to exchange experiences and informations. This was expecially true during the COVID19 pandemic, and we took this as an opportunity to offer online upgrade courses to teachers (PID@Home).
We present results from three ex-post surveys (SY '22-'23, '23-'24, '24-'25), analyzing how this short research experience has a positive impact on teachers’ training and motivation, and we will briefly discuss the experience of PID@Home

Keywords: Development, teachers, physics, COVID19.