Continuous professional development(CPD) for teachers: what needs to be done and why

What does continuous professional development (CPD) for teachers entail

While discussing continuous professional development (CPD) for teachers, one often begins with the question, “What is continuous professional development?”. A simple online search or a textbook will throw up many answers, one of them being – CPD is a set of learning experiences that help you develop and improve your professional practice. This can include building on your strengths, and developing where you have capability gaps.

In his Dictionary of Education, C V Good and W R Merkel (1973) define Continuing Professional Education as “the continuing education of adults for occupational updating and improvement conducted by a wide variety of institutions, organizations, and businesses, which usually consists of short-term, intensive, specialized learning experiences often categorized by general field of specialization, such as continuing medical education or continuing legal education.”

Day (1999) explains professional development in terms of “all natural learning experiences, where consciously planned activities directly or indirectly benefit individual or group of teachers who review, renew and extend their commitment as change agent to the moral purpose of teaching and acquire skills, knowledge and professional thinking throughout each phase of teaching.”

Further, Wallace (2015) defines Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in the context of teaching as “continuation of a teacher’s professional development beyond their initial training, qualification, and induction. This may take many forms, including participating in short courses to update skills or knowledge; longer courses of study, such as diplomas and postgraduate degrees in education; staff development events held within the teacher’s own institution; conferences; mentoring; and peer assessment.”

Richards and Farell (2005) attempt to categorize teacher learning under three categories. These include: (i) Teacher learning as a cognitive process; (ii) Teacher learning as personal construction, and; (iii) Teacher learning as reflective practice.

CPD for teachers as a layered practice

From these different definitions, we see different layers to CPD. If we were to look at the teacher’s role in these categories shared by Richards and Farell, we see how all these require time for introspection and deepening practice. Does our system really build all this into a teacher’s role? A teacher is expected to deliver across-classroom teaching and learning and support their school to run efficiently. To meet each of these requirements of their role, teachers need support across a variety of skills, knowledge pieces and most crucially, time to deepen practice.

Teaching isn’t a “profession” that is simply about transferring knowledge and skills. It is about a teacher bringing her whole self, and developing the ability to view her students as whole selves, with lives beyond the four walls of the classroom. At the same time, it is also about a teacher opening herself up to the world and its new ways of working, with a firm grasp of the content that she delivers to her students.

Teaching is then an experience, co-created by learners and teachers. What kind of a CPD space will enable this? NEP 2020 mandates 50 hours of CPD per year, across a variety of modalities like in-person training, online training, self-learning, and peer learning spaces.

If we look at these hours globally, we see a country like Japan, follow a lesson study approach. Here teachers put approximately 35% of their efforts and time into CPD. Countries like Singapore invest close to 100 hours per year in CPD. Here teachers are trained to use action research projects in the classroom. South Korea mandates a similar 90 hours per year. It places a requirement to complete 180 hours to be eligible for a promotion.

The time that a teacher needs to spend on CPD continues to be varied, to be debated globally. One must also critically look at how the time that is allotted is being spent. As we explore CPD experiences from a variety of lenses, we hope this issue is an invitation to take a peek into different windows of perspectives on the continuous professional development of teachers.

The diversity of perspectives in CPD for teachers

Over the last seven years at Kanavu, we have been working with an inspiring team of teachers working across four rural schools in Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu. Who are our teachers? Why do they teach? What does ongoing learning mean for them? What is happening state-wide and what does it mean for our teachers’ classrooms? These have been some questions we have explored in this journey.

This edition of Samuhik Pahal explores these, and similar, questions with organizations whose work we have admired, been inspired by, learned from, and collaborated with.

The diverse locations of CPD in the system call for unique approaches that best suit teachers in each of these contexts. In this issue of Samuhik Pahal, we have attempted to bring together voices from CPD at large and local scales, perspectives from urban and rural contexts, and approaches of CPD from mainstream and alternate schools.

This edition of Samuhik Pahal is an invitation to think about the evolution of CPD in the country starting from the 1980s and to locate its current challenges. The contributors of the issue tackle the theme from multiple vantage points. The aspects they deal with include the importance of creating a positive opinion about CPD amidst teachers, the challenges of CPD at a state-level, and the need for data-driven approaches, and the complexities of working on CPD for teachers at scale.

The importance of teacher agency and collaboration in their CPD

Two key aspects of teachers’ continuous professional development that are often missing in practice are teacher agency and collaboration. Building schools that foster teacher agency, creates an environment for teachers to experiment, make mistakes, take risks, fail and learn. This, along with an ecosystem to share best practices, failures and reflections, creates accountability organically.

Much of the systems rely heavily on teacher accountability, fearing autonomy. This leaves teachers mostly as recipients of a teacher development program, built for them by others, as against a program co-created by them. Attempts to improve the current situation must include building strong communities of practice among teachers and nurturing spaces for collaboration.

Pressures of the school system, syllabus completion, and resource optimization leave little room for teachers to have adequate time for reflective planning and practice in the everyday. Factoring this in as a key ingredient of a teacher’s professional development can become a starting point for teachers to build it into their practice, as a way of thinking about their role. In this issue of Samuhik Pahal, many different CSOs across the country discuss how they make it happen within their schools, programs and teams.

In human history, there has never been one kind of a great teacher or one approach to great teaching. Especially in the post-pandemic world, there are so many modalities and opportunities open for teachers, to learn, grow, and reach students. Teachers remain the largest of workforces employed globally, continue to be underpaid, and are not supported to be their best in their classrooms. It is in this background and context, that we set place this exploration of teachers’ CPD in this issue.