Building the capacity of teachers is critical for education systems to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) — inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030. However, existing approaches to teacher professional development (TPD) in developing countries often face challenges of quality, inclusiveness, and costs, particularly when delivering TPD at large scale. New approaches are required to enable the delivery of large-scale and cost-effective continuous professional development programs for all teachers.

The “Supporting Teacher Professional Development” project (October 2018 to December 2021),  formalized and expanded the work of the TPD@Scale Coalition for the Global South, whose membership includes 23 international development and aid agencies, government agencies, non-government organizations, research centers and think tanks, and higher education institutions from all over the world, to successfully meet the project’s overall objective of contributing to the attainment of SDG 4 through research and development on TPD@Scale, policy and practice influencing, capacity-building within ministries of education and their partner organizations, and harmonizing efforts and investments in TPD@Scale. 

Highlights of the project include: 

• The creation of a knowledge base in TPD@Scale including a TPD@Scale Framework working paper that articulates the underlying principles, core concepts, components, practices, and tools of a demand-driven, system-embedded, and flexible approach to equitable, high-quality and efficient large-scale, ICT-mediated TPD, and encapsulates the lessons learned from Coalition work in the form of three key insights: “Design for scale, localize for inclusion,” “Match technology choice with professional learning needs,” and “Act, evaluate, improve.” This working paper is accompanied by a compendium of TPD@Scale examples from across the Global South drawn from two landscape reviews; background papers on equity, quality, cost-effectiveness, and assessment; case studies on TPD@Scale models in Ecuador, Indonesia, and the Philippines; a collection of open courses for decision-makers, TPD program designers, other practitioners, and stakeholders; policy briefs and practice guides; and reports on other related research.
• Policy and practice influencing and capacity-building through a combination of direct engagement with ministries of education and their partners, on the one hand, and a range of international and regional knowledge-sharing events, including high-level engagements with ministers of education, senior education officials, and key non-government practitioners in Asia and Latin America, on the other.
• Strengthening of the Coalition, mobilizing resources, and expanding the impact of project work to other Global South countries through active partnerships with 17 of 23 Coalition members that yielded, among others, consortia that applied for and were awarded two Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange grants, three IDRC grants, and one grant from the Panamanian Government for TPD@Scale and related activities implemented in 12 more countries: Ghana, Honduras, Uzbekistan, Kenya, Uganda, Chile, Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan, Lebanon, Tunisia and Panama. 

Three key insights have been gleaned from project work: 

• Design for scale, localize for inclusion
• Match technology choice with professional learning needs
• Act, evaluate and improve

These insights are central to the TPD@Scale Framework elaborated in a working paper and will inform the research agenda for TPD@Scale as the project moves into the next phase of research and development.