In October 2026, Norway's Directorate for Education and Training published a new analysis of TALIS 2024, the OECD's international survey of teachers and school leaders. One finding deserves particular attention: just 32% of Norwegian lower-secondary teachers reported that the professional learning they had undertaken during the preceding year had positively influenced their teaching. The OECD average was 55%.
The figures need some care. They reflect teachers' perceptions rather than independently observed changes in classroom practice, and the OECD has flagged a higher risk of non-response bias in Norway's data. They tell us relatively little about the quality of individual courses or the reasons teachers felt their professional learning had limited impact.
Still, 32% is a figure worth thinking about, particularly for those of us who spend a considerable amount of time designing and delivering professional learning.
The familiar business of professional development
Anyone who has organised professional development in a school knows how easily success can become an administrative measure. The training happened. Most people attended. The feedback was positive. There is a certificate, a slide deck and perhaps a shared folder with resources. Six weeks later, the timetable has moved on and nobody is quite sure what, if anything, teachers are doing differently.
This is a familiar experience in schools, and it doesn't necessarily mean the professional learning was poor. A workshop might introduce genuinely useful research, challenge an assumption or help a teacher understand something they have been struggling with. That matters. But there is quite a distance between finding an idea interesting on a Tuesday afternoon and knowing what to do with it when faced with 28 pupils on Wednesday morning.
A teacher can leave a session on formative assessment convinced of the value of checking for understanding more carefully, yet still need to work out which questions to ask, how to interpret the answers and what to do when half the class hasn't understood. Someone attending a workshop on classroom dialogue might understand the principles perfectly well, only to discover that the first attempt produces silence, three enthusiastic contributors and a discussion that goes nowhere.
These are ordinary difficulties in learning to do something well. The trouble is that professional development often ends just as this part of the learning begins.
What happens afterwards?
Imagine a department spends an afternoon exploring better classroom questioning. Staff discuss examples, try out a technique and leave with a few approaches they would like to use. The following week, one teacher changes the way they open a lesson. Another plans a longer pause after asking a question. A third returns to familiar routines because an assessment deadline has consumed the week.
A month later, the department meets again. Perhaps the workshop is mentioned briefly, perhaps it isn't. There are examination arrangements to discuss, a new policy to consider and a dozen other things requiring attention.
Nobody has deliberately abandoned the learning. It has simply been absorbed into the ordinary demands of school life.
There is something slightly odd about this when you consider how much attention teachers give to the design of learning for their pupils. We know that hearing an explanation, however compelling, is rarely enough to develop a complex skill. Pupils need opportunities to practise, receive feedback, revisit ideas and apply what they know in unfamiliar situations. We expect them to encounter difficulties along the way, and we try to design learning that helps them work through those difficulties.
Yet we can be surprisingly willing to assume that a few hours of professional development will somehow find its own way into teachers' practice.
Of course, adults bring different experiences, knowledge and motivations to learning. Teachers are also professionals who can make their own decisions about what is useful. But the underlying challenge remains. Understanding an idea and becoming confident in using it are different achievements, and the latter usually requires time and experience.
The conditions matter
The Norwegian findings are interesting for another reason. In the underlying TALIS survey, 93% of Norwegian teachers reported that they could rely on their colleagues, while 88% described good professional relationships with their principal.
Those are encouraging figures. They suggest that many Norwegian teachers work in environments where professional relationships are strong, even as relatively few report that recent professional learning has positively influenced their teaching.
We should be cautious about connecting these findings too neatly. The survey cannot tell us why teachers responded as they did, and good relationships are only one part of the conditions for professional learning. Still, the contrast raises a useful question about what collaboration actually involves.
Teachers can get along well, share resources and support one another without necessarily spending much time examining teaching together. There is a difference between a department where colleagues are helpful and one where teachers regularly bring examples of their practice, discuss what happened and work through what they might do differently.
Neither culture can be created simply by scheduling another meeting. Teachers need time, trust and a worthwhile reason to do the work.
We explored a related issue in an earlier article, Professional development only helps if teachers have room to use it. The research discussed there suggested that providing more professional development does not necessarily coincide with teachers feeling better supported. Learning opportunities also create demands, particularly when teachers are expected to implement new approaches alongside everything they already do.
That matters here. A teacher might leave an excellent workshop with a clear idea of what they want to change, only to find that the planning, experimentation and reflection required to make it happen have no place in the working week.
Designing learning for teachers
Perhaps we should pay more attention to what participants actually experience during professional development, too.
If a programme is intended to help teachers design more intellectually demanding lessons, it seems reasonable that they should spend some time doing intellectually demanding work themselves. If the subject is collaboration, participants ought to have an opportunity to experience collaboration that requires more than discussing a question with the person beside them.
And if we're asking teachers to become more reflective about their practice, we need to give them something worth reflecting on.
That doesn't mean filling every workshop with activities. There is enormous value in listening to someone who knows their subject well, reading something difficult or having the space for a sustained conversation. Sometimes the most useful thing a facilitator can do is introduce an idea and allow people enough time to think about it.
The important question is what participants are expected to learn and how the experience helps them get there.
For a school leader commissioning professional development, that might mean looking beyond the programme description and asking what teachers will actually be doing. Will they have opportunities to work with the ideas, test their understanding and connect the learning to their own classrooms? Is there a realistic plan for what happens when they return to school?
For those of us designing and facilitating professional learning, it means accepting some responsibility for what happens beyond the session itself. We cannot control the conditions in every school, and it would be unreasonable to promise that attending a course will produce a particular improvement in pupil outcomes. But we can design experiences that give teachers a better starting point for applying what they have learned.
A course on classroom questioning, for example, might ask participants to analyse real exchanges between teachers and pupils, develop questions for a topic they are about to teach and rehearse how they might respond to different answers. A follow-up conversation several weeks later could then examine what happened when those questions were used with actual pupils.
There is no guarantee that the approach will work as intended. That is precisely why returning to the experience is useful.
Looking beyond attendance and satisfaction
Schools invest considerable time and money in professional development. It is reasonable to want to know whether that investment has been worthwhile.
Attendance figures tell us who participated. Feedback forms can tell us whether teachers found the experience relevant, engaging or useful. Both have their place, particularly when deciding whether to offer something again.
But they provide only a partial picture of what people have learned.
A more interesting conversation might begin several weeks later. What have teachers tried? What surprised them? Have they changed their minds about anything? What proved difficult, and what support would help them continue?
Some of the answers might be disappointing. An approach that sounded promising may have proved impractical. Teachers might have discovered that they needed more subject knowledge, better resources or a different starting point. That is useful information, too, provided there is an opportunity to do something with it.
Nor should we assume that every change in teaching represents an improvement in learning. Establishing effects on pupils requires different evidence, and educational outcomes are rarely attributable to a single professional development experience.
The Norwegian TALIS findings do not establish that professional development in Norway is failing. They describe teachers' reported experiences at a particular point in time, with limitations that matter when interpreting the results.
What they do offer is a reason to examine something that can be easy to overlook.
When we plan professional learning, we tend to devote considerable attention to what will happen during the session. The content, the facilitator, the activities, the venue and the feedback all receive careful consideration.
Yet the most consequential part of the learning may happen afterwards, when a teacher tries something unfamiliar, discovers that it is harder than expected and begins to work out how to do it better.
If we want professional development to influence classroom practice, that part deserves rather more of our attention.
