What do you understand by ‘teacher professional development’? Compare your ideas with ours.

This is our definition of effective teacher professional development:

• ‘activities that develop an individual’s skills, knowledge, expertise and other characteristics as a teacher’ (OECD, 2009, p. 49)
• learning that includes formal and informal experiences
• a long-term and continuous process that includes regular opportunities and experiences planned systematically to promote growth and development in the profession (Darling-Hammond, et al., 2017)
• a systems approach that is adopted to strategically develop high-quality teachers at scale in a cost-effective way (Asian Development Bank, 2017)

As you can see from this definition, TPD@Scale is not a set of structured lesson plans, or a teacher’s guide to the student textbook – although these resources for teachers do have value and purposes. 

Notice that our working definition of TPD operates at the systemic level and at the individual level. The definition focuses on individual growth that is systemically planned and sustained.

TPD@Scale is fundamentally different to the ‘cascade’ model of TPD.

In face-to-face cascade models of TPD, national expert instructors train regional or divisional trainers who, in turn, train district trainers, who then reproduce this training to school leaders and teachers. A small number of educators at the ‘top’ end of the cascade may experience high-quality learning, but the quality of TPD diminishes the farther it travels down the ‘cascade’. High quality experiences, learning and resources do not reliably ‘trickle down’ to teachers at lower levels of access and provision. This is particularly true for rural teachers and teachers in underserved communities.

TPD@Scale is about scaling through adaptation – rather than scaling through replication, adoption or re-invention. Scale is achieved through the widespread use of model programmes that are modified according to the needs of different users. In TPD@Scale programmes, the creative use of ICTs aims to achieve more equitable distribution of quality TPD for all teachers.

Watch this brief presentation about scaling and how we scale teacher professional development to achieve the impacts that matter – improvement in classroom teaching practices.

Disclaimer: This video has been uploaded for testing purposes only. Not for quotation or circulation.