Teachers

Teachers are the single most important school-based factor affecting how much students learn. More than just conduits of information, they equip children with the tools to analyze, problem solve, and effectively use information.

The most effective interventions to improve student learning rely upon strong teachers. A shift from a weak teacher to a very good one can equate to several additional years of schooling and learning. These educators also influence long-term social and work outcomes for students.

To ensure that all children are taught by effective teachers, the World Bank recognizes the importance of preparing and supporting teachers throughout their careers. This support to teachers is increasingly crucial in the context of high global learning poverty rates, particularly prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, and the significant learning recovery needs due to prolonged school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Within this context, key challenges include:

High levels of learning poverty – the share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 – reflect in part an inability to appropriately recruit, prepare, support, manage, and motivate teachers.
In many countries, teachers are not equipped with the skills they need to deliver effective teaching and learning.
Moreover, assessing teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge and skills is not straightforward, while data are scarce, and available studies are not encouraging.
While well-performing education systems provide effective initial teacher education (preservice), including theoretical knowledge and practical skills on content and pedagogy, as well as a practicum component, this is not the case in many countries.
Effective continuous professional development (CPD) can improve teachers’ practice and learners’ outcomes. However, most large-scale professional development programs do not feature the characteristics known to be successful.
44 million additional teachers will be needed to achieve universal primary and secondary education and fulfill the promise of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) by 2030.

Smart investments in teachers have great potential to improve education quality and student outcomes.

Last Updated: Nov 09, 2023

In 2018, the World Bank launched the Global Platform for Successful Teachers with the report “Successful Teachers, Successful Students: Recruiting and Supporting Society’s Most Crucial Profession” (updated in 2021) and the Teach Primary classroom observation tool.

Support countries to develop and implement successful teacher policies

Principles underpinning the World Bank’s approach to supporting teacher policymaking include:

Make teaching an attractive profession by improving its status, compensation policies, and career progression structures.
Ensure that initial teacher education (preservice) includes a strong practicum component so that teachers are well-equipped to transition and perform effectively in and beyond the classroom.
Promote meritocratic selection and effective deployment of teachers to ensure that all students have access to good teaching.
Provide continuous support and motivation, in the form of high-quality continuous professional development (CPD) and strong school leadership to allow teachers to continually improve.
Use technology wisely to enhance the ability of teachers to reach every student, factoring their areas of strength and development.

Support countries to measure effective teaching practices

The World Bank’s open-access suite of classroom observation tools – Teach Early Childhood Education (ECE), Teach Primary, and Teach Secondary – are designed to help low- and middle-income countries collect data on effective teaching practices. Since its launch in 2019, the Teach suite of classroom observation tools have been administered in more than 25 countries, and ongoing implementation is happening in 15 more countries.

Support to countries to improve teacher continuous professional development (CPD)

The World Bank’s Coach program helps countries design, implement, and evaluate teacher CPD programs and systems to align with evidence-based effective practice. The program consists of three elements: (1) the development of technical resources; (2) the provision of operational support; and (3) the facilitation of stakeholder engagement. The vision of the Coach program is that all teachers have access to high-quality CPD opportunities that are tailored, practical, focused, and ongoing. These principles and the Coach program tools and resources apply to many forms of effective CPD, such as workshops, seminars, online courses, school- and cluster-based training, collaborative learning communities, mentoring, coaching, and more.

Making teacher policy work

Our forthcoming report, Making Teacher Policy Work, examines what it takes to design better teacher policies, using a framework that combines education and behavioral science insights and real-world policy examples. The report highlights that (1) effective teacher policies facilitate individual-level change by addressing barriers that teachers face in making the targeted changes; and (2) for teacher policies to work at scale and over time, they must be operationally feasible and politically acceptable. The report’s framework asks at the individual level if the teacher policy is clear, doable, and rewarding; and at the system level if the policy is operationally feasible and politically acceptable.

Last Updated: Nov 09, 2023

The World Bank Group is supporting countries around the world to develop and implement successful teacher policies; identify and evaluate effective teaching practices; and improve teacher continuous professional development (CPD).

Examples include:

In Punjab, Pakistan, adapted versions of the Teach Primary classroom observation tool and the Coach program tools and resources were implemented by the government to provide tailored and personalized feedback to teachers to help them improve their teaching. This was carried out in three phases: first, by collecting data from more than 800 schools to assess current teaching practices; second, by developing a teacher mentoring program; and third, by using the observation tool in all public schools in the province to collect and provide timely feedback on teaching practices.

In the Dominican Republic, a comprehensive teacher reform that included the creation of professional and performance standards for the accreditation and development of the teaching career. These standards are used in the process of selection, training, induction, and evaluation of teachers.

In Sri Lanka, the World Bank supports the development of a career framework that offers mobility across roles associated with the classroom, administrative positions, and roles involving advisory or training services or becoming a teacher-educator.

In Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), the World Bank supports a media campaign to explain the importance of teachers for the country’s future as part of a package of interventions to increase teachers’ intrinsic motivation. In addition, support is being provided to strengthen teacher training colleges as professional development centers by creating standards for trainers and providing capacity building to enhance these training colleges as hubs for teachers’ continuous professional development.

In Malawi, the World Bank supported the government in building an updated, accurate, and comprehensive database of teachers and their postings, identifying and analyzing the factors driving teacher allocation (e.g., road access to schools, electricity, distance to nearest trading center), and developing a school categorization that drove policy reforms to reduce disparities without added cost: new teachers are targeted to hardship schools, and the 20 percent of teachers working in the most remote schools receive a meaningful bonus.

Last Updated: Nov 09, 2023

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