Continuous professional development of school teachers: experiences of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan

The chapter reviews the current status of teacher development, with a specific focus on continuous professional development (CPD), in three South Asia countries: Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The view taken is that CPD is a process of supporting teachers and their development, and is inclusive of the range of approaches, modalities, and institutional arrangements operating in the region. The school structure of the three countries is presented first as CPD has largely evolved historically from inspection and around a deficit model of the teacher. The structure is based on administrative units of schooling and responsive to its demographic changes. The next section reviews the evolution of CPD, and it is argued that this is intimately linked to the political economic history of mass education, and specifically to the emergence of international aid driven activities from the 1990s onwards. The extensive presence of nongovernment agencies is noted. The third section discusses the dominant forms of CPD: the cascade model of training and teacher resource centers. The chapter concludes with reflections on the challenges of funding, quality, working at scale, absence of coherent policy, and emerging trends in usage of ICT.