Outcome-Focused Teacher Professional Development: Enhancing Agency, Autonomy and Long-Term Shift in Instructional Practice

• In Event: Empowering Teachers: Enhancing Agency, Autonomy, and Innovative Practices Across Global Contexts

Proposal

Teacher Professional Development (TPD) is pivotal for improving student learning outcomes, particularly in the context of rapidly evolving digital educational systems. Globally, TPD faces significant challenges including ensuring teacher autonomy, demonstrating tangible impacts on student learning, facilitating behavioural shifts in teaching practices, and achieving long-term sustainability. Research highlights that while TPD programs are crucial for enhancing teaching quality, many struggle with limited impact due to inadequate support for teacher autonomy and insufficient focus on behavioural change (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Desimone, 2009). Additionally, sustaining effective TPD requires long-term commitment and resources, which are often lacking (Guskey, 2002). This abstract presents a TPD programme designed for in-service teachers in Tripura, a northeastern state of India with socio-economic complexities, focusing on outcome-based capacity building and to institutionalise a set of proven and repeatable practices for inservice teachers’ training. It aims not only to elevate teaching quality but also to build evidence on how improvements in student outcomes are directly linked to effective teacher development.
Tripura faces significant educational challenges, including teacher shortages in remote tribal areas, high student-teacher ratios, and uneven access to quality instructional tools. The state's diverse socio-economic composition, coupled with geographic isolation, further exacerbates these challenges. Despite improvements in school enrollment, gaps persist in student achievement, particularly in secondary education.
In response, the three year Teacher Professional Development (TPD) programme under the Tripura Rural Economic Growth and Service Delivery Project (TRESP), seeks to address these challenges while centering autonomy and agency of teachers. Implemented by The Transform Trust and People For Action in partnership with the SCERT, the program covers 14,965 teachers from Classes 6-12.
The TPD programme in Tripura adopts a multi-modal approach by making available 700 hours, per subject, of structured, ready to use resources and a cumulative of 150 hours over 3 years per teacher of training, peer support and reflection spaces to adopt these resources, fostering teacher autonomy, agency and sense of outcome achievement within an academic year.
The programme makes available curriculum-aligned, ready-to-use resources in 4 core subjects with teachers’ flexibility to use them. These resources support lesson planning, content adaptation, and classroom management, enabling teachers to efficiently prepare and deliver instruction for classrooms with high variance of student performance. This aligns with the findings of Beg et al. (2023) that offering flexibility doesn’t induce shirking or affect implementation fidelity.
Teachers participate in structured workshops that integrate both face-to-face and online learning. The training includes pratices on inclusive education contextualised for a complex state like Tripura with ethno-linguistic diversity. The digital self-learning modules provide teachers with autonomy over their professional development, allowing them to access resources on-demand and at their own pace.
Peer collaboration is facilitated through quality circles, where teachers engage in reflective dialogue, share best practices, and collaboratively solve classroom challenges. AI/ML analytics powered inputs on low performing learning outcomes reinforced within the academic year through these circles will enable teacher adaptation within the academic year. These networks would be sustained through existing digital communication platforms fostering flow of ideas and practices and will be anchored by a dedicated person until embedded into the system . Research indicates that such peer networks are critical for promoting professional agency and sustained behaviour change in instructional practice (Pearson & Moomaw, 2005).
Teachers are enabled with the scope & resources to conduct action research projects, documenting the impact of new pedagogical strategies on student learning. This reflective practice fosters continuous improvement and aligns with studies showing that data-driven reflection is essential for long-term capacity building (Guskey, 2002).
The research embedded within the TPD program is designed to systematically document the link between teacher capacity-building and student learning outcomes. Third Party Assessments of teacher competencies and student performance are done at both the beginning and end of the programme which will inform the TPD design over the period. This allows for a clear understanding of how teacher development translates into improved student achievement, especially in subjects like Mathematics and Science, where learning gaps are most prominent. Longitudinal data collection will enable tracking teacher performance and student outcomes over several years. By leveraging longitudinal data, the programme aims to build evidence on how sustained TPD efforts contribute to long-term improvements in both teaching practices and student outcomes (Bandiera et al., 2020).Teachers engage in classroom-based action research, which not only informs their own instructional strategies but also provides qualitative data on the impact of new teaching methods on both learning & inclusivity outcomes. This reflective process is key to creating a continuous feedback loop that leads to ongoing improvements in both teaching and learning (Guskey, 2002).
Drawing on research in behavioural change (Albarracín et al., 2024), the programme integrates low-stakes feedback mechanisms to foster a culture of trust and openness. Teachers receive non-evaluative feedback, allowing them to experiment with new teaching strategies without fear of negative consequences, thus promoting sustained shifts in practice.
By integrating ready to use classroom and self learning resources, enabling peer learning & reflection and creating a data-driven framework for continuous improvement, the Tripura TPD programme presents a scalable model for in-service teacher training. It will serve as a blueprint for other states in India, demonstrating how cycles of in-service teacher training, supported by pedagogically sound resources and evidence-based practices, can produce sustainable improvements in teaching and learning. By linking teacher empowerment with student outcomes through a data-driven research framework, the programme provides a pathway for state education departments to design effective TPD initiatives that will demonstrate sustained impact.

Authors

• Lipsa Bharati, Transform Schools, People For Action

• Pankaj Vinayak Sharma, Transform Schools, People For Action

• Shraddha Jha, Transform Schools, People For Action

• Neetu Sahu, Transform Schools, People For Action

• Tanushree Narain Sharma, Transform Schools, People For Action