Teacher Professional Learning

What goes into making great teachers and a thriving teaching profession? There is agreement around the world that teachers are essential in shaping the knowledge, skills and values and attitudes of young people. However, there can sometimes be a tendency to think of great teachers simply ‘appearing’, without fully acknowledging the important structural features that shape their learning and growth. As education systems look to strengthen to meet the demands of the 21st century, a holistic view of teacher professional learning across a teacher’s career is essential to supporting the flourishing of our teachers, schools and, ultimately, students.

A strong teaching profession begins with attracting the best possible candidates and providing them with quality preparation. Whilst historically we have tended to primarily think about a series of specific ‘hoops’ for new teachers to jump through, policymakers across systems now also need to ensure that there are multiple routes for new teachers to enter the classroom. This is because it is now far more common for young people to imagine having multiple careers, but it is also a reflection of the diversity of skills that we expect our classrooms to nurture. Building strong digital literacy, social-emotional skills and climate literacy may mean finding ways of supporting individuals with existing expertise in these fields to become teachers.

This new reality of the teaching workforce only increases the importance of ensuring that preparation for the classroom is both theoretically sound and informed by the practical realities of the classroom. It is also about supporting the holistic development of teachers from day one; nurturing teachers’ sense of purpose and their ability to research, collaborate and reflect. These can provide teachers with a ‘compass’ to navigate the complexities and demands of teaching as their careers progress. Meanwhile, attending to the transition to the classroom, such as through ongoing mentoring and coaching from expert teachers, is essential for all teachers, regardless of their initial pathway to the classroom.

Building a strong teaching profession is also about ensuring that from day one there are both opportunities to grow, and recognition of this. A clear and attractive career structure underpins this; one that incentivises and rewards excellence, but that also offers a degree of agency and choice. One part of this is getting the financial incentives right, but it is also important to not lose sight of the fact that key to the attractiveness and strength of the teaching profession is how it works. Teachers desperately want opportunities to meaningfully collaborate together in their schools to build and exchange knowledge. In this respect, rich collaborative professional learning is essential for both capacity-building in the profession – particularly during periods such as today of rapid and unpredictable change – and for the sense of motivation that the profession feels. Quality professional learning can be an investment in retention.

This invites consideration of how professional learning connects as part of a wider ecosystem. A thriving profession is shaped by not only what happens within schools and the learning interactions that occur there, but also that between schools. Networks – both in-person and in the digital space – can be powerful means of creating new knowledge and ensuring more equitable access to it. In particular, as research on teaching continues to advance and grow, ensuring that system-level approaches are in place to mobilise this body of scientific knowledge and support its effective use is essential too. Indeed, this is a reminder of how interconnected professional learning across a teacher’s career is; teachers’ research literacy begins in the skills and attitudes they develop in initial education and runs through their career as they are supported to keep up-to-date with the latest developments.

Despite the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine has shown a remarkable tenacity and will-power to transform its education system through the New Ukrainian School (NUS) reform. Ukraine has continued even in the most challenging of circumstances to continue the reform efforts started in 2016. This has concentrated on fostering a richer, more holistic education experience where students develop depth of knowledge and transformative skills such as critical thinking and social-emotional skills. This demands that classrooms shift to including more competency-based pedagogy, which is why efforts to support the professional learning and growth of its extraordinary teachers are so important for the long-term success and sustainability of the NUS.

Whilst Ukraine’s unwavering efforts to strive for a better education system even in the context of Russia’s war of aggression is unique, many of the questions that they are confronting echo across systems. After all, the quality of an education system hinges upon its teachers. The challenges of nurturing a workforce that can foster students’ holistic development and navigate the unpredictability of technological progress are not unique to Ukraine. The insights from research and country examples included in this report can serve as points for reflection for all systems, and perhaps also spur action as they are in Ukraine.