The theme of World Teachers’ Day tomorrow is: “Recasting teaching as a collaborative profession,” highlighting the transformative potential of collaboration for teachers, schools and education systems. Reframing teaching as inherently collaborative—supported by policies, practices, and environments that value mutual support, shared expertise, and joint responsibility—is essential to strengthen teaching, learning, and teachers’ professional fulfilment ...
“Teachers play vital roles in education systems, driving learning, inclusion, and innovation in schools and societies. Yet many work without collaborative structures to support their pedagogy, agency, professionalism or well-being. In many systems, the profession remains marked by isolation, fragmented structures and limited opportunities to build networks with peers, mentors and school leaders, affecting both educational quality and teacher retention” (UNESCO).
In observing World Teacher’s Day, let’s reflect on whether we have created conditions to nurture effective teachers who strive for excellence in all that they do. The days of “chalk and talk” are over. What quality assurance systems/opportunities exist for teachers’ continuing professional learning, for example, on digital skills and pedagogies? Such opportunities are critical for capacity building—to enable teachers to adapt their pedagogical approaches to new learning environments.
Underpinning these opportunities must be policies for digital transformation developed by the Ministry of Education and embraced by individual educational institutions. How are we motivating teachers to engage in ongoing professional learning? Are we providing the resources and time for them to do so?
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) 2025 Policy Paper, “Preparing teachers for digital education: Continuing professional learning on digital skills and pedagogies,” OECD Education Policy Perspectives, No.122, makes interesting reading. The OECD rightly states that teachers need “to be prepared to unlock the potential of education technology, to enhance students’ learning outcomes and to protect them from risks in an increasingly digital learning environment. This policy paper discusses how continuing professional learning (CPL) can prepare teachers for these challenging new tasks.”
According to the OECD, many countries increasingly promote collaborative formats for teachers’ continuing professional learning.
“In many OECD countries, teachers already engage in collaborative and school-based professional learning formats, such as peer-learning activities on the use of digital resources e.g. mentoring schemes or communities of practice” and co-teaching. Online training is also in effect in some countries. In my niece’s secondary school in Spain, she has been trained to provide specialised support for her peers in the use of digital resources and in teaching ICT skills and media literacy. Support in job-embedded contexts can be very effective.
Most countries use mechanisms to encourage and facilitate participation in continuing professional learning on digital education. “Some countries... actively encourage professional learning on digital resources by providing teachers with incentives related to their evaluation or career opportunities...Empirical evidence suggests that professional learning activities are most effective when they are embedded, content-focused, sustained and collaborative...
“Research evidence suggests that not all forms of continuing professional learning (CPL) are equally effective and supports a shift away from traditional learning formats, which tended to be passive, standardised and one-off. Instead, research highlights the effectiveness of engaging in active, collaborative and individualised forms of CPL over a sustained period of time.
This includes school-based programmes that allow teachers to improve their practice by co-operating with other teachers (Opfer, 2016[20]), individualised instructional coaching carried out by trained teacher coaches (Blazar and Kraft, 2015[21]; Kraft and Blazar, 2017[22]), or matching effective teachers with less effective ones (Papay et al., 2016[23])” (OECD).
The OECD recommends that effective continuing professional learning should cover a range of learning contents and formats.
“The effective use of digital technologies in the classroom not only requires teachers to master technical skills, but also the ability to tailor digital resources to subject-specific contents and instructional activities (OECD, 2020[17]). Teachers’ CPL for digital education therefore needs to cover a wide spectrum of learning contents and formats” - formal and informal professional learning activities.
“These can range from highly structured activities, such as traditional seminar-style training courses, to informal practices emerging from the daily activities of teachers, such as informal mentoring arrangement or unstructured professional exchanges and collaborative work (Boeskens, Nusche and Yurita, 2020[19]).”
The OECD defines life competencies as “a combination of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that individuals need to thrive in a complex and changing world.” If we are to prepare students for our highly technological world, we need to re-envision the relationship between teachers and students; the physical structures in which teaching and learning take place; and devise strategies for more effective home/school/community links.
