- Effective teacher training depends on more than good courses — it requires institutional conditions like time, resources, coordination, and planning, according to a new IDB study of education plans across the nine states of the Legal Amazon in Brazil.
- The study found that while all of the states prioritize continuing teacher training, many have opportunities to further strengthen institutional responsibilities, coordination mechanisms, and guaranteed time for teachers to participate.
- These findings are important for Brazil, especially as several states in the country begin revising their education plans for the next decade.
Training teachers must become state policy. Over the past few decades, we have seen a welcome increase in investment in continuing teacher training. But an important question needs to be asked: do school systems have the conditions they need for this training to generate real professional development?
At first, this question may seem strange—after all, when we think about continuing training, we usually talk about content, methodologies, and courses. However, effective training does not depend solely on the quality of the experiences offered to teachers: it also depends on having the time, resources, institutional coordination, and planning needed for it to happen consistently.
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) supported a study on teacher training plans in Brazil because continuous professional development for teachers is one of the most cost-effective investments for improving the quality of education in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In Brazil's Amazon region, this agenda takes on added urgency: the region faces specific challenges around access, teacher retention, and learning, compounded by geographic dispersion and the diversity of the populations it serves. That is why, under the Amazonia Forever program, the IDB partnered with Ceapea (the Center for Applied Studies in Teaching and Learning Practices) and Lepes (the Laboratory for Studies and Research in Social Economics and Education) in Brazil to conduct the study and help states and municipalities design more effective teacher training policies.
This way of thinking about training is relatively recent. For a long time, the prevailing idea was that training existed to fill gaps in teachers' knowledge, expressed through terms like “retraining” and “capacity building.” Today, however, continuing training is increasingly understood as part of teachers' professional development throughout their careers. Over the past few decades, this understanding has gained ground in education policy and in debates about valuing the teaching profession. Even so, the availability of training experiences capable of truly strengthening teachers' work remains uneven and far from the reality of many school systems.
We now know that effective training has very specific characteristics. It needs to engage with the real challenges teachers face, connect to the subject areas they teach, promote active learning, enable meaningful exchange among peers, and unfold over time rather than in one-off events. We also know that teachers learn differently than their students do. Adult professional learning depends on connecting new knowledge with the concrete problems of practice.
“Professional development is not the sole responsibility of the individual, but the result of institutional choices, planning, and public investment”.
There is, however, an aspect often overlooked in this debate. Even when we know how to design good training experiences, they do not emerge spontaneously. Their existence depends on the ability of education departments to create the conditions needed for them to happen. It was this realization that led Ceapea, part of Todos Pela Educação, and Lepes to develop the Program for Assessing the Institutional Conditions for Continuing Training Provision (PACI-FC). Its goal is to examine the extent to which school systems are organized to offer their educators consistent professional development opportunities.
PACI-FC is based on a conceptual framework grounded in the international evidence on effective teacher professional development, translating that knowledge into a practical tool that helps education authorities strengthen the institutional conditions needed to deliver high-quality continuous professional development at scale.
The research identified seven institutional dimensions essential to sustaining quality training policies. These include clear guidelines for training, the availability of time for teacher participation, adequate resources, the presence of qualified trainers, coherence between training and curriculum, the use of methodologies suited to adult learning, and the capacity to monitor and evaluate the results of training efforts. In other words, it is not enough to simply offer teachers courses and workshops: an institutional infrastructure must be built that is capable of turning professional development into lasting public policy.
With this lens, Ceapea and Lepes, in partnership with the IDB, analyzed the continuing training policies found in the education plans of the nine states that make up Brazil's Legal Amazon (a federally designated planning region broader than the Amazon rainforest itself): Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, and Tocantins. The study produced is part of the Amazônia Forever and sought to understand the extent to which the region's regulatory frameworks incorporate elements capable of sustaining teacher professional development policies.
The results reveal important progress.
- In every state analyzed, continuing training appears as a priority of education policy. The right to training is present in the documents, and there is recognition of its relevance to improving education.
- At the same time, the analysis identified significant challenges. In most of the plans, training is presented as a set of courses or opportunities to be offered, but it is rarely accompanied by a clear vision of which professional capacities are meant to be developed or which concept of teaching and learning guides those efforts. Strategies that define institutional responsibilities, coordination mechanisms across different areas of education management, or concrete guarantees of time for teacher participation are also uncommon.
- Another relevant finding concerns how the policies are contextualized. Although the plans acknowledge the need to serve Indigenous, Quilombola, riverine, and rural communities, there is still room for training strategies to engage more deeply with the Amazon's specific challenges and the concrete demands of professionals working in these territories.
These findings should not be read as criticism of school systems, but as an invitation to reflection. The country has just approved a new National Education Plan, and states and municipalities will soon begin revising their own plans for the next decade. This is a rare opportunity to strengthen continuing training as a foundational policy for the teaching profession.
If we want teachers to keep learning throughout their careers, expanding the supply of courses is not enough. We need to build the conditions that make that learning possible. Valuing the teaching profession means recognizing that professional development is not the sole responsibility of the individual, but the result of institutional choices, planning, and public investment.
The study "Institutional Conditions for Effective Continuing Teacher Training: Evidence and Lessons from the Brazilian Legal Amazon" (available in Portuguese) starts from exactly this premise. Rather than looking only at courses and programs, it examines school systems' capacity to create the institutional conditions needed for continuing training to fulfill its most important function: strengthening the teaching profession and expanding learning opportunities for Brazilian students.