Reforming English Pre-Service Teacher Education (Part 2)

Posted on 12 August 2026 by Simon Borg

In my previous post, I described how a large-scale review of English language teaching in Iraq led to curriculum reform in Colleges of Education and Basic Education across the country. By 2025, updated curricula had been piloted and early evaluations suggested that the changes had been implemented successfully and positively received. It was also clear, though, that university curriculum reform can only achieve its goals if lecturers have the knowledge and skills to implement updated approaches to teaching and learning.

The evaluation of the implementation of the new curricula for English departments concluded that lecturers would benefit from opportunities to develop their general pedagogical knowledge and skills. Consequently, in 2025-26 I designed and delivered a national professional development programme for College English lecturers focusing on these areas:

The programme consisted of three days of face-to-face work followed by four months of practical applied work. The group size was almost 50; this was purposefully large as I wanted to demonstrate that active and interactive student-centred pedagogical approaches can be applied even in larger classes.

The face-to-face sessions combined input with discussion, reflection, collaborative tasks and the analysis of real materials (including samples of course descriptions,  session plans and examination papers participants were asked to bring with them).  

One lesson from professional development research is that short training events rarely produce lasting changes in practice. For this reason, the face-to-face work was followed by four months of structured follow up. During this period, lecturers were expected to apply ideas from the workshops in their own contexts, reflect on the results and share their experiences with colleagues.

To support this process, lecturers were organised into ten topic-based working groups. Each group was allocated a specific theme from the programme (as far as possible based on preferences they had expressed) and asked to undertake a practical project related to that topic (for example, to review and revise an examination paper, to implement a new active learning strategy or to try out some new technology). Written guidelines were provided, WhatsApp groups were established to facilitate communication, and online tutorials were organised to offer additional support. Within groups, lecturers were able to work individually but the goal was to produce one report that synthesized the group’s learning about a particular topic.

Lecturers were encouraged to experiment with new ideas in their own teaching and collect evidence to reflect on the results. The strongest projects were subsequently published in a collection of pedagogical inquiries which documents how participants experimented with new approaches designed to enhance student engagement, participation, understanding and learning.

A recurring theme in the lecturer accounts was the move away from highly teacher-centred classes towards more participatory forms of learning. Several lecturers experimented with low-stakes formative assessment techniques, including online quizzes, polling tools and redesigned examination tasks. Technology and AI also featured prominently. Participants investigated how digital tools could support lesson planning, classroom interaction, reading comprehension, assessment and feedback. Importantly, many of the reports stressed that technology was most effective when used selectively and in support of clear pedagogical goals.

The outcomes of the programme (including positive participant evaluations) provided support for teacher professional development that:

  • is highly-contextualised
  • combines input and interaction
  • draws on participants’ prior knowledge and experience
  • uses practical and authentic tasks
  • demonstrates rather than just explains target pedagogical practices
  • supports ongoing implementation in the classroom.

However, there are aspects of the programme, particularly the practical follow-up group work component, that I would modify next time to secure more sustained participation. In my final blog in this series, I will reflect on this and other lessons emerging from this reform project to date and consider their wider implications for effective educational change.

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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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