© FEMS 2020. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com ORIGINAL UNEDITED MANUSCRIPT Adopt a Bacterium: a professional development opportunity for Teacher Assistants Taschner, N.P 1 ; de Almeida, L.G.+ 1 ; Pose, R.A 2 ; Ferreira, R.C.C 1 1 Institute of Biomedical Science, Department of Microbiology, 2 Municipal University of São Caetano do Sul. * Corresponding author: Natalia Pasternak Taschner Avenida Professor Lineu Prestes, 1374, 05508-900 São Paulo-SP, Brazil. E-mail: nataliapasternak@gmail.com ABSTRACT Science teaching in most Brazilian Universities tends to focus mainly on lectures and provides few opportunities for the development of modern teaching skills. Our group developed an online tool called Adopt a Bacterium, which consists on a Facebook group where teacher assistants (TAs) can interact with students and have a first contact with student-focused learning approaches. This work shows the TAs’ own assessment of how the tool could be further explored to help them develop skills and become better teachers. Keywords: Adopt a bacterium, professional development, Facebook, teacher assistants, microbiology teaching, microbiology pratical classes INTRODUCTION Evidence-based teaching has acquired an important status in higher education discussions in the past 15 years. Microbiology is no stranger to this debate, and in 2012, the American Society for Microbiology has published a document that focus on understanding the subject (Merkel 2012). This comes as Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/femsle/fnaa131/5881304 by Carleton University Library user on 05 August 2020