Gunjan Tripathi, Vice Principal, Aravali International School, Faridabad, explains that most conversations about an educator’s professional development revolve around Familiar questions. What workshops should we run? Which certifications should teachers pursue? What topics matter most? These are important discussions, but they often overlook a more fundamental question: How do teacher training and mentoring actually live in our classrooms and schools?
The same policy, the same mandate, and the same resources can produce vastly different outcomes across schools. The difference lies not in the policy itself but in how school leaders and teachers interpret, implement, and sustain it. Therefore, the question is not whether we develop teachers but how that development translates into meaningful change.
Many of us have seen professional development initiatives, analysed them, debated them, and recognised both their strengths and limitations. The overarching purpose of the CBSE Continuous Professional Development (CPD) framework is to bring greater consistency and effectiveness across the vast network of CBSE schools in India and abroad. It is, without question, a worthwhile objective.
Setting the intention
In Indian traditions, every meaningful endeavour begins with a Sankalp—an intention. Whether it is worship, yoga, or any significant undertaking, intention comes before action. This idea provides a powerful starting point for thinking about professional development.
Before we discuss workshops, certifications, or training hours, we should ask ourselves a simple but profound question: ‘What intention do we begin our professional journey with?’
The purpose of practice – strengthening those who serve
At the centre of every educational decision is the child. Every effort we make as educators ultimately exists to benefit our students. The purpose of teacher development is not merely to improve teachers; it is to improve learning experiences and outcomes for children.
The analogy of the airline safety briefing is useful here. Passengers are instructed to secure their own oxygen masks before assisting others. Similarly, teachers must continue to grow, learn, and develop before they can effectively support the growth of their students. The goal, therefore, is to create a professional learning ecosystem that benefits teachers and, through them, benefits every child in their care.
Beyond the workshop walls
Under the CBSE framework, teachers are required to complete 50 hours of CPD annually. Twenty-five of these hours are provided through CBSE-designed programmes focusing on pedagogy, values, and professional growth. The remaining 25 hours are typically organised by schools.
However, professional development can be approached in two very different ways. The first approach views training as a requirement to be completed. Teachers attend workshops, collect certificates, fulfil mandated hours, and move on. The second approach views professional development as an opportunity for transformation. In this model, learning is intentional, reflective, and connected to practice. The difference between these approaches is significant.
What we choose to do with these CPD hours is important. These questions sit at the heart of effective professional development: Are these hours opportunities for passive consumption, or can they become opportunities for meaningful growth and transformation? Can schools intentionally design experiences that extend and deepen the learning gained through external workshops? How does one learning experience build upon another? How does professional learning influence what happens in classrooms? How does the learning compound over the course of an academic year?
Schools cannot afford to wait for perfect centralised programmes. The CBSE workshops already exist and will continue to be offered. The challenge lies in how schools use them. Consider a common scenario. A teacher attends a well-designed CBSE workshop and returns to school with valuable insights and ideas. What happens next? In many cases, very little.
Effective professional learning requires an architecture built on practices, relationships, reflection, and culture. Schools should consider the following questions: Does the workshop inform our school-wide practices? Do teachers discuss and reflect on the learning together? Does learning influence lesson planning? Does it affect classroom instruction? Does it improve student outcomes?
Without these connections, workshops remain isolated experiences. With them, workshops become catalysts for sustained professional growth.
The barriers within
Teachers are not resistant to learning. Most educators are eager to improve their practice and support their students more effectively. The problem lies elsewhere. Many professional development programmes operate on the assumption that exposure to good ideas automatically leads to change. Unfortunately, this assumption is flawed.
Teachers attend workshops, receive strategies, and return to demanding schedules with limited opportunities for experimentation. As a result, learning remains separate from teaching. Over time, educators may develop an unintended belief that learning happens during training sessions while teaching happens elsewhere. This separation is deeply problematic.
Classrooms often reflect the learning experiences of teachers. If teacher learning is disconnected from practice, classroom learning may become similarly disconnected. The challenge is not teacher willingness. The challenge is creating structures that connect learning to action. If this approach appears logical and beneficial, why is it not more common?
Several barriers continue to prevent meaningful professional development from taking root in schools.
Lack of structured time: Teachers rarely have dedicated opportunities to learn together. Professional conversations often happen informally in corridors, staff rooms, or during brief moments between classes. A full-day workshop may deliver seven or eight hours of information, but teachers rarely have enough time to process, discuss, and apply what they have learned. Learning requires reflection. Without reflection, implementation becomes difficult. Meaningful collaboration requires protected time. Without it, professional learning becomes fragmented and inconsistent.
Observation linked to fear and weak coaching structures: Many schools still lack effective mentoring and coaching systems. Observation and feedback are often viewed as evaluative rather than developmental. Teachers may feel judged rather than supported. As a result, opportunities for peer observation, coaching, and collaborative learning are often avoided. The absence of supportive coaching limits the impact of professional learning.
Administrative overload: School calendars are crowded with lessons, meetings, reports, parent interactions, examinations, and administrative responsibilities. Professional learning frequently becomes an additional task rather than an integrated part of the system – quite like a box to be checked.
Generic training: Many workshops offer broad strategies without sufficient consideration for context. Teachers need support that connects directly to their classrooms, their subjects, and their students. Generic advice often struggles to gain traction because it lacks immediate relevance.
Measuring the wrong outcomes: Schools frequently focus on attendance records and certificates. These measures indicate participation but reveal little about impact. The more important questions are: Did classroom practice change, did student engagement improve, and did learning outcomes improve? These are the measures that truly matter.
Beyond insight, towards practice
Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework — Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment — offers a useful test for professional learning: does this experience actually produce any of these, or only a certificate? A single workshop rarely does. Positive emotion and accomplishment come not from attending a session but from watching a strategy work in an actual classroom; engagement demands that teachers plan, try, and revise rather than sit and absorb; relationships and meaning grow through the collaboration that surrounds a workshop, not the workshop itself. Seen this way, PERMA isn’t a separate checklist for teacher well-being – it’s the case for treating a workshop as a beginning rather than an end.
The sequence might look something like this:
Workshop → Reflection → Collaborative Discussion → Planning → Classroom Application → Feed-forward → Refinement
In this model, learning continues long after the workshop concludes. For example, teachers could attend a CBSE session and then spend school-based CPD time discussing its implications for their specific context. They could examine student work, design lessons together, create assessments, and explore practical applications.
The strategies could then be implemented in classrooms, followed by reflection and discussion about what worked and what could be improved. A one-hour workshop can become a four- or six-hour learning cycle that leads to genuine professional growth. The workshop itself becomes only one component of a much larger process.
Small steps, lasting change
Schools seeking sustainable improvement may benefit from a phased approach.
Phase One: Clarity: The first stage involves reflection and discussion. Schools examine current CPD practices and identify priority areas for improvement.
Phase Two: Alignment: Rather than pursuing numerous initiatives simultaneously, schools select one or two key themes for concentrated focus. Staff and leadership work together to build commitment around these priorities.
Phase Three: Infrastructure: Professional learning structures, schedules, and routines are aligned to support the selected themes.
Phase Four: Reflection and evaluation: Schools assess whether classroom practices changed and whether the chosen priorities resulted in meaningful improvement. The cycle then begins again with new areas of focus. The principle is straightforward. Less is often more. Schools that focus deeply on a small number of priorities are more likely to achieve meaningful results than schools attempting to address everything at once.
Leading the culture of learning
School leaders play a vital role in shaping professional learning cultures. Leaders influence not only structures and systems but also beliefs and behaviours. Timetables should be designed to create opportunities for collaboration. Teachers of the same subject must be given a sacrosanct meeting slot that cannot be reassigned for other duties. Team teaching and peer observation ought to be facilitated.
Leaders can create psychological safety by reinforcing the idea that mistakes are opportunities for learning rather than evidence of weakness. They can normalise reflection, inquiry, and collaboration. Most importantly, leaders create culture. What happens between policy and classroom practice is ultimately determined by leadership.
Schools do not necessarily need more policies, programmes, or mandates. They need to embrace intentionality. When schools move beyond compliance and work on conscious learning, teachers thrive, classrooms improve, and students benefit. That is the true purpose of professional development—not simply completing hours but creating lasting and meaningful change.
Contact details
Gunjan Tripathi
Vice Principal, Aravali International School, Faridabad