Reforming English Pre-Service Teacher Education (Part 1)

Posted on 31 July 2026 by Simon Borg

Educational reform is best understood as a process rather than an event, requiring sustained interaction between policy, implementation and professional learning. Since 2021, I have contributed to a collaborative reform project involving the British Council and the Ministries of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Federal Iraq and the Kurdistan Region that aims to strengthen pre-service English teacher education nationally. The timeline below summarises the main stages of this five-year programme of work. In a three-part blog, I will describe the work completed (Parts 1 and 2) and (in Part 3) reflect on lessons learned for the reform of pre-service English teacher education programmes.

The project began with a large-scale study of English language teaching and learning in Iraq. This examined English language teaching (ELT) across schools, universities, and non-formal educational settings and identified several areas of ELT where reform would support improved secondary school English learning outcomes. One of the report’s central recommendations was that the preparation of pre-service English teachers should be updated, to include a stronger focus on the development of English teaching skills, alongside the existing emphasis on knowledge of language, literature, linguistics and broader educational fields such as psychology.

These findings prompted a major curriculum reform initiative. In 2022-23, working groups involving local experts reviewed existing College English pre-service programmes and developed updated curricula designed to align more closely with contemporary understandings of language learning, teaching methodology, assessment, and teacher competence. To make local buy-in more likely, the goal of the review was not a radical overhaul of the existing curricula but meaningful enhancements to the focus and number of ELT courses.

Following formal approval of the updated curricula, pilot colleges were identified and in 2023-24 their first-year lecturers and department heads (HoDs) received remote and face-to-face support to prepare for implementation. This include work on course design, writing course descriptions and designing sessions. In 2024-25 Year 1 of the updated curricula were piloted in five universities across Iraq and were evaluated using evidence from session observations, interviews with lecturers and HoDs, student feedback, and course documentation. The evaluation found that the revised programmes had been implemented as planned and well-received by staff and students. Areas where further support for curriculum reform were needed were also identified, especially in relation to continuing support for the development of lecturers’ pedagogical skills.

As a result, in 2025-26, the project provided more intensive training for larger groups of HoDs and lecturers. This reflected the view that simply changing the content of pre-service programmes would not automatically improve programme quality or the competence of graduates. It was also necessary to support changes in the design, delivery and assessment of learning. The next phase of the project therefore focused on developing the pedagogical knowledge and skills of College English lecturers. This work and its outcomes will be the focus of Part 2 of this series.

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International Handbook of Research on Teachers’ Beliefs (2nd Edition)

Posted on 24 July 2026 by Simon Borg

Research on teachers’ beliefs remains one of the most active areas of educational inquiry. Across a wide range of subjects and educational settings, researchers continue to explore what teachers believe about teaching, learning, assessment, motivation, technology and curriculum. This sustained interest reflects an enduring assumption: teachers’ beliefs influence how they make sense of their work and the decisions they make in classrooms every day. The recent publication of the second edition of the International Handbook of Research on Teachers’ Beliefs is a reminder of the vitality and ongoing relevance of this field.

In English language teaching (ELT), interest in teachers’ beliefs has grown substantially over the last 30 years. Since the emergence of language teacher cognition as a recognised field of study in the 1990s, teachers’ beliefs have featured prominently in research on language education. Studies have examined what teachers believe about grammar teaching, corrective feedback, assessment, multilingualism, learner autonomy, teacher development and many other aspects of classroom practice. The result is a rich and diverse body of work that continues to expand internationally.

Surprisingly, the first edition of the international handbook, published in 2014, did not include a chapter on ELT. When I was invited to review the proposal for the second edition, I pointed out this omission and was subsequently invited to address it myself. The result is a chapter in the new edition of the handbook called Teachers’ Beliefs in English Language Teaching.

This chapter reviews research on teachers’ beliefs in ELT published between 2018 and 2024 and considers what it reveals about the current state of this long-established field. Drawing on an analysis of 266 publications and a detailed examination of 30 studies, it explores the geographical distribution, topics, participants, conceptualisations and methodologies that characterise recent work. The review shows that research on teachers’ beliefs remains a productive area of inquiry, with particular attention to issues such as corrective feedback, assessment and writing instruction. At the same time, the chapter argues that much of this research continues to rely on familiar rationales, methods and research questions, especially comparisons between teachers’ stated beliefs and their practices. It concludes by calling for more theoretically informed, context-sensitive and educationally purposeful (as I argued for in an earlier blog) research that seeks to understand teachers’ work in relation to broader professional, institutional and socio-cultural influences.

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Increasing Teacher Engagement in Online Professional Development Groups

Posted on 16 July 2025 by Simon Borg

One of my recent projects involved the evaluation of a Facebook group for English language teachers. The use of Facebook groups to support teacher development has been studied (see, for example, the open access paper by Nelimarkka et al., 2021) and various benefits to teachers of such groups have been identified, including improved knowledge and understanding, access to resources and information, social support, networking enhanced professional identity and informal learning and reflection. This research, though, has typically studied public Facebook groups run by teachers themselves. In contrast, the group I examined – British Council TeachingEnglish Courses for teachers – has some rather unique features:

  • it is private
  • it is moderated by tutors
  • it is large (over 90,000 members)
  • content is posted to the group only by the group administrator; members cannot post content themselves but they can leave comments, replies and reactions.
  • content is often linked to separate free self-study online courses provided by the British Council’s TeachingEnglish global programme that many of the members do
  • there are 3-4 new posts every day.

One of the objectives of the group is ‘to foster collaborative and self-directed learning through community engagement and support of meaningful interactions and relevant knowledge-sharing between members’. Two key questions for the evaluation were:

  1. To what extent was this objective being met?
  2. What factors affected the fulfilment of this objective?

To answer these questions I studied a month’s worth of group activity in detail (91 posts and 2,746 comments and replies) and also drew on Facebook analytics, member surveys and interviews with members, tutors and administrators.

In brief, the key insights from the study were:

  1. Reflecting trends commonly observed in social media communities, a relatively small number of members (whose identities change over time) contribute actively (by commenting on posts) while a larger sub-group read posts without commenting.
  • Survey respondents identified various benefits of the group for their professional development, including increased motivation and confidence, improved knowledge and new teaching ideas.
  • The kinds of posts which generated most teacher engagement were discussion starters (such as statements for teachers to complete – ‘I help learners develop their communication skills by _____’), polls and live sessions (where tutors discussed a specific topic). Posts which called for higher levels of member engagement (for example, reading and reflecting on an article) generated less response from teachers.
  • Tutors played an important role in responding to member contributions and stimulating interaction in the group. Interaction was, though, largely between tutors and individual teachers, with limited evidence of interaction among members themselves.

Multiple factors related to Facebook itself, group content and member characteristics interacted in complex ways to influence how much member engagement there was in the group. A key practical insight was that when interactive online professional development groups for teachers of English are being designed a range of member characteristics need to be considered (see Figure 1 below). Teacher engagement can be viewed as a product of the alignment that is achieved between member characteristics, on the one hand, and the objectives of the online group and the assumptions made in its design, on the other.

Figure 1: Member characteristics that influence their engagement in online professional development groups.

If you have designed online professional groups for teachers and have insights to share on how these can become sustained, interactive, teacher-led reflective spaces please share your experiences.

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Improving the Effectiveness of Professional Development

Posted on 26 April 2024 by Simon Borg

It was great to attend the IATEFL Conference last week after a few years away. In particular, after what feels like years of working online, it was just so nice to meet people in person again and to give a talk to a real audience.

In the talk, I discussed a number of factors which – based on my experience as an evaluator in the last 10 years – make a difference to the effectiveness of organised professional development programmes for English language teachers. I went back and read several evaluation reports I had written – 12 to be precise, from 12 programmes in 12 different countries involving around 30,000 teachers in total – and looked for insight into elements that enabled these programmes to achieve more (or, in contrast, which limited their impact).

There were too many factors to cover in the 30 minutes available, so I focused on six (though on further reflection I’ve decided to replace ‘teacher autonomy’ in my original list with ‘teacher motivation’):

Overall, when a professional development programme, addresses these factors carefully, it is more likely to impact positively on teachers, including by promoting pedagogical change. The practical messages for anyone designing a programme to support the professional learning of English language teachers are as follows:

  • Needs analysis informed by multiple sources of information (including, crucially, evidence of what teachers do in classrooms) allows appropriate decisions to be made about the areas of their work teachers need support with; relying on one source of information (including what teachers say they need) is a less effective approach;
  • Understanding, strengthening and sustaining teacher motivation to grow professionally and to innovate in the classroom are key elements in effective professional development programme design (teacher motivation, in my view, is more important than teacher autonomy – especially when joining a programme is mandatory);
  • English teachers’ levels of English proficiency vary considerably across global contexts; where they are modest (such as A2, which is often below the target set for learners), it is important for professional development to provide sustained opportunities (i.e. many hours) for teachers to improve their English and not to focus only on teaching skills in the hope that teachers’ English will develop incidentally;
  • Without support for innovation as a design feature of professional development programmes, teachers will find it difficult to change, in any sustained manner, how they teach; support for change at classroom and school level is thus vital (professional development which does not impact on what teachers do is ultimately of questionable value);
  • In-service teacher educators (whatever particular name they are given) play a vital role in supporting teacher professional development; on effective programmes, teacher educators meet ‘advanced’ criteria and receive preparation for their role as well as ongoing support;
  • Key decisions about professional development programmes should be informed by an understanding of the socio-educational context in which the programme will take place. For example, asking teachers to work at the weekend may be acceptable in some contexts but not in others; expecting teachers to engage in collaborative reflection will not be feasible (without support) if ‘collaboration’ and ‘reflection’ are not part of teachers’ current professional practices; and whether teachers work with prescribed textbooks and assessment procedures also makes a big difference to the kinds of pedagogical change professional development can feasibly aim for.

There are several other factors that should be considered when professional development programmes are being designed but which I did not discuss in the talk (see below). In some cases, their presence is always facilitative (such as appropriate objectives, or resources ) while in others appropriate choices need to be made among the options available (such as programme duration – longer programmes are not by definition always better than shorter ones). Teacher autonomy is desirable but, in my experience, not vital. And where professional development aims for systemic change (for example, in an organisation, district or even country) too much individual teacher autonomy can be counter-productive. ‘Controlled autonomy’ is a concept I find useful – space for individual choice within a broader standardized professional development framework.

Readers may also be interested in going back to my earlier related post on designing effective CPD and which the ideas presented in this year’s IATEFL talk are related to. A recent research report on in-service trainers may also be of interest.

It would be interesting to hear from readers who are involved in designing professional development programmes – does my analysis reflect your experience and are there other key factors that could be mentioned?

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New Research on In-Service Teacher Educators

Posted on 27 March 2024 by Simon Borg

Given the important role that in-service teacher educators play in education systems worldwide, the volume of research that studies their work remains surprisingly scarce. One reason for this is that the role of the in-service teacher educator itself is not always officially defined in different educational contexts. Another is that the specialized knowledge and skills the role calls for are often not sufficiently understood (and so, for example, in-service teacher educators are often seen as simply more experienced, qualified or capable teachers). Clearly, though, the quality of professional development teachers receive is affected by teacher educator competence, and improved teacher educator effectiveness is an important element in the broader goal of improving educational outcomes.

The British Council has in recent years expanded the dedicated support it provides for teacher educators globally through a range of self-access and more formally organised resources and activities – information about these is available here. At country level, too, the British Council commissions research into the work of teacher educators and a recent study I conducted in Nepal with my colleague there Prem Prasad Poudel has just been published. Entitled, ‘The practices, perspectives and professional needs of in-service teacher educators in Nepal‘, the study focuses on teacher educators (referred to locally as trainers) who deliver in-service courses for Provincial Education Training Centres (PETCs). One defining feature of these teacher educators is that the vast majority of them work on a ‘roster’ basis – i.e. being a teacher educator is not their primary role in the education system (most are teachers) and they deliver courses for the PETCs periodically when called upon. The purpose of the research was to understand the experiences of these teacher educators (across a range of subjects) and to make recommendations for improving in-service trainer capacity and effectiveness in Nepal.

This study took place between October and December 2023, and evidence was collected from teachers, trainers and PETC officials in all seven provinces of Nepal through the observation of training sessions, face-to-face and remote individual and group interviews and an online trainer survey. The results highlighted strengths of the in-service training system in Nepal (such as motivated trainers) but also several factors that limit the quality of their work (such as lack of opportunities for professional development). These are discussed in the report, along with 20 recommendations for concrete measures that can be taken to strengthen several dimensions of Nepal’s in-service training system.

This study is of more general relevance to educational systems where centrally organised in-service training is the main form of professional development that teachers have access to.

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