3 reasons why leadership teams might be a solution for relevant teacher professional development
This blog summarises reflections from Educators Shaping Futures, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
A Global Moment for Strengthening Teacher Support
On November 3-4 in Addis Ababa, the Educators Shaping Futures event, co-hosted by the World Bank, Florida State University, the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, and UNESCO, was a global knowledge exchange aiming to raise awareness and build coalitions for change for stronger teacher preparation and professional support.
At the event, the Learning Generation Initiative (LGI) led a session which put forward the approach of ‘leadership teams’ as a solution to ensuring robust teacher professional development. We know effective teacher professional development does not happen in isolation — it depends on coherent, well-aligned support from different roles across the education system. No one role can do it all. School leadership teams, which can include principals, senior teachers or mentor teachers, for example, are uniquely positioned to embed professional learning into the daily fabric of teaching, promote peer learning, and ensure that new and experienced teachers have access to meaningful and ongoing development opportunities. Middle-tier actors, such as district or ward officials or regional offices, play a complementary role by offering support to school leaders, instructional leadership, data-driven and strategic guidance, as well as system-wide coherence.
This session was a collaboration between LGI, EdTech Hub, STiR Education and Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) Africa and examined how different roles across the system can work together to ensure teachers receive the 360-degree professional support they need to thrive. Through case examples, we explored critical considerations on how a team approach can provide better capacity for teacher development and the conditions for impactful career-long professional learning.
Featured speakers 🔉
- Daniele Ressler, Director of Research, Learning and Evaluation at TaRL Africa
- Katie Godwin, Head of Research for the Education Workforce Initiative at the Learning Generation
- Hannah Simmons, Country Lead for Tanzania and Africa Lead at EdTech Hub
- Jane Sebuyungo Nantayi, Associate Head of Design and Programme Readiness at STiR Education Uganda
Key Insights 📝
Here are three insights from the session illustrating why we think leadership teams are vital for successful teacher professional development.
1. Leadership teams using data at each level of the system can promote dynamic & adaptive decision-making and school support over siloed approaches
MEWAKA (Mafunzo Endelevu ya Walimu Kazini) is the Government of Tanzania’s national teacher continuous professional development (TCPD) Programme, which consists of three main components:
- Learning Management System (LMS), which provides content for
- Teacher communities of learning (CoL) at the school and cluster levels, and
- Self-paced learning for teachers.
The programme is intended to decentralise TCPD while maintaining quality. Communities of learning and individual teachers can access Learning Management System (LMS) modules across a range of subject-specific and cross-cutting topics (e.g., from teaching English vocabulary to applying gender responsive and inclusive pedagogy), which empowers them to use TCPD to respond to the needs faced in their school. The LMS content itself is developed by experts at the Tanzania Institute of Education (TIE) to ensure that quality content is on hand to effective, participatory TCPD.
Leadership from each level of the system plays a key role in delivering the programme (see Figure 1), and each uses data to strategically guide provision of teacher professional development and assure quality of implementation.
At the national level, the Tanzania Institute of Education access and share data on the most/least popular LMS modules, completion rates and module rating & feedback to improve the quality and range of modules & respond to feedback from teachers. At the middle level, ward education officers use data on module use & frequency, attendance of CoL, and CoL reports to increase the ability to follow up on programme quality & implementation. At the school level, school quality assurance officers use data on which modules have been completed to ensure school observations align with skills/knowledge acquired through TCPD.
EdTech Hub, in partnership with TIE, is providing technical assistance and implementation research to make data generated through the LMS more accessible and easier to interpret for these different levels of leadership.
2. Leadership teams can more easily facilitate collaborative relationships that promote intrinsic motivation
Sustainable professional development is not driven by compliance or external incentives. It grows when teachers feel connected, valued and intrinsically motivated. This is the core principle of the STIR Education approach.
In STiR Education’s partnership with the Ugandan Ministry of Education and Sports, which supports teacher professional development using a system-led approach in 119 districts, leadership teams are key players in creating real and enduring change.
STiR Education believes that lasting change is fuelled by intrinsic motivation, and intrinsic motivation drives sustainability. Our system-led approach works through role modelling, peer learning networks, action planning, feedback and reflection.
The district officials are central to this process. They coach school leaders, provide instructional guidance and align efforts with system priorities using school data. This empowers school leaders to facilitate motivation and collaboration and create an environment where teachers and learners can thrive.
STiR Education supports district officials to shift from administrative oversight to a coaching-focused mindset. They are trained in feedback and coaching skills, facilitation and reflection so they can model supportive, developmental school visits. This helps build leadership that inspires and strengthens teacher motivation.
District officials reinforce the structures used in schools by asking reflective questions such as ‘What support worked well for your teachers this month?’ and ‘What small improvement can you try next?’ This encourages shared responsibility between district and school leaders and helps create a consistent support system for teachers.
Leadership teams also promote continuous learning cycles, where teacher development becomes part of everyday practice. Monthly network meetings, school-based practice sessions, peer collaboration, classroom observations and simple handbooks help build habits of ongoing improvement rather than one-off training events.
STIR Education recognises that district officials already manage demanding workloads, from policy to administration to guiding teams. Adding coaching responsibilities can feel challenging. STiR therefore designs simple and focused portfolios that make the work manageable. Through reflection, feedback, action planning and peer networks, leaders create conditions where teachers can build autonomy, mastery and purpose.
This leads us to an important question: What should leaders and officials truly prioritise so that motivation, collaboration and continuous learning can thrive?
3. Different leadership team approaches can help adapt and scale models of TPD across contexts
Scaling effective teacher professional development (TPD) models across vast and varied regions—such as the TaRL approach—demands a distributed leadership approach that promotes quality and accountability across the entire education system by responding to actual needs. For TPD to move beyond successful pilots, key practices and principles of effective teacher support – such as practical, classroom-based training & coaching – must be reflected at all levels, with clear roles and responsibilities connecting system support for teachers. In the TaRL approach, this includes Leaders of Practice (mentors) who provide 1:1 practical, classroom-oriented coaching; School Leaders who establish the enabling environment by ensuring time is dedicated to professional learning and school-level teacher support; and Government Middle-Tier (regional, district or ward/zone) officials who drive systemic accountability by integrating TPD monitoring and resourcing into existing structures for continuous improvement of schools.
Crucially, an advantage of this distributed leadership is that it enables contextual adaptation, which is vital for scaling in diverse environments across sub-Saharan Africa. A one-size-fits-all training model is likely to fail when faced with local challenges like security risks, high travel costs, low connectivity, or varying teacher skills. Leadership teams must be empowered to diagnose these barriers and enact “right-fit solutions”. For instance, in Nigeria, barriers to in-person mentoring led leadership to innovate and pilot school-level teacher peer-mentoring as a promising, effective, low-cost adaptation. Similarly, Côte d’Ivoire’s leadership adapted by exploring a shift to regional training and oversight to improve cost-efficiency for teacher mentoring, alongside hybrid continuous professional development (CPD). These examples demonstrate that different leadership approaches are essential for pivoting strategically, turning local limitations into opportunities for model refinement and greater reach.
Ultimately, the most critical function of leadership in scaling TPD is fostering systemic conditions for long-term sustainability. This involves ensuring that new professional practices become permanently institutionalised within the education system – at all levels of leadership – rather than relying on external projects. In Zambia, leadership is actively working to integrate the TaRL approach (known as Catch Up) into the existing government School Programme of In-Service Training for the Term (SPRINT) and bringing Catch Up into pre-service teacher training colleges. By strategically choosing to build TPD support into established mechanisms, leadership safeguards the longevity of the program. Their role is to secure the future of high-quality TPD by prioritising integration, simplicity, and responsiveness over complex, parallel structures.
In TaRL Africa’s experience, in many countries and contexts, sustainable TPD at scale requires a systems thinking lens: a coordinated, multi-tiered team of leaders build sustainable support systems that are integrated into the daily life of schools, ensuring consistency and quality at scale.
Closing Reflections and Key Messages
While the three cases differ in context and design, several cross-cutting insights emerge about how systems can strengthen teacher support and development through leadership teams.
First, leadership teams form the core infrastructure for continuous teacher learning; they redistribute the work of supporting teachers in ways that match how systems actually function. Taken together, the examples illustrate that teacher growth depends on many interlocking tasks: diagnosing needs, modelling practice, organising peer learning, interpreting data, and following up in classrooms. No single role, whether principal, mentor, district official, or national curriculum agency, can realistically sustain all of this. Leadership teams help distribute these functions so that support for teachers is not vulnerable to turnover, capacity gaps, or bottlenecks at a single level. Domestic governments and global partners could consider strengthening these teams because they provide a practical response to the structural complexity of improving teaching at scale.
Second, leadership effectiveness depends on capabilities for using data, fostering relationships, and adapting decisions to context. Across contexts, leaders operate in environments shaped by workload pressures, travel distances, limited connectivity, and uneven teacher experience. The cases point to a critical insight: leaders who can use simple data, build relational trust, and adjust expectations to fit these constraints are the ones who keep professional development moving. These capabilities support resilience in the system. They allow leaders to maintain momentum when conditions are imperfect. Investments in leadership development could therefore focus on strengthening these adaptive capabilities, which are central to making professional development feasible, not just well-designed. Lastly, leadership teams amplify impact when they pair local flexibility with a small number of predictable, shared routines. A striking pattern across the cases is that adaptation works best when it is anchored in a stable set of core practices: regular school visits, structured reflection, simple coaching cycles, or predictable peer meetings. These routines give teachers a sense of continuity and prevent fragmentation as programs scale or shift formats. At the same time, leadership teams adjust how these routines are carried out to match local realities. This combination of coherence and flexibility allows teacher development to function both at scale and in diverse contexts. Domestic governments and global partners could consider supporting leadership teams to maintain this balance, which appears to be a fundamental driver of sustained teacher support.
