What about?
Questions that concern teachers
JUNE/JULY 2026 | n.º 7 | In this section, experts invited by YVIRÁ answer questions submitted by teachers who are part of the National Science for Education Network (Rede CpE) as "Friends of the Network".
For this edition, Manuelita Falcão Brito, executive superintendent at the Directorate of Public Management and Educational Policy Development at FGV DGPE, touches on a point that many educators know well: the distance between what initial and continuing education courses offer and what teachers actually want and need in the classroom. In the text that follows, she delves into questions rarely raised when designing a teacher training program. Check it out.
IMAGE: ADOBESTOCK
A PROPOSAL THAT BUILDS BRIDGES
"How can we build a continuing teacher training program that can address the existing gap in undergraduate courses regarding contributions from educational psychology and neuroscience that truly resonate with local realities? How can this training produce effective pedagogical pathways that value existing knowledge and practices and respect the needs and interests expressed by the professionals undergoing training themselves?"
Perceiving the differences between teachers is the same as what is expected of them in relation to students: each one arrives with a different repertoire and needs.
Overworked teachers are not inclined towards lengthy, strictly theoretical training disconnected from the classroom.
Science teaches us, among many other things, that adults learn best when new knowledge is anchored in something they already know, when there is room for reflection, and when learning has immediate practical application.
It is necessary to recognize that practicing teachers arrive at continuing education with an accumulation of practical knowledge, and ignoring this is not only a waste, but a pedagogical mistake. A good training proposal begins by mapping the existing repertoire, from the mastery of the content itself – which undergraduate studies have not always developed in depth – to the identification of the methodologies and strategies that each teacher already uses, with what results and in what contexts.
Perceiving the differences between teachers is the same as what is expected from them in relation to students: each one arrives with a different repertoire and needs. This diagnosis can be done in many ways, but it takes courage to identify these gaps in an environment of mutual trust, where limitations are not a pretext for any form of harassment or depreciation of teaching performance.
Perceiving the differences between teachers is the same as what is expected of them in relation to students: each one arrives with a different repertoire and needs.
Gaps like the ones the reader mentions rarely appear in the spontaneous demands of teachers, simply because undergraduate courses did not present them, and what reaches them daily is shown in a fragmented and often decontextualized way. The role of the training proposal is to create bridges between this knowledge and the everyday problems that teachers already recognize as their own. When a teacher realizes, for example, that a student’s difficulty concentrating may have a neurological explanation, and when this explanation guides their practice, a natural bridge is created between areas of knowledge.
What and how do teachers want to learn?
We are talking about practicing truly active listening and not just through generic questionnaires applied at the beginning of the year. Teachers know how to name the challenges they face, whether it is students who do not learn to read in the expected time, classes with difficult dynamics, a fragmented school community, high social vulnerability, limited resources, or advanced technological mediation.
Relevant training starts from these real demands and connects them to knowledge that expands the repertoire of skills that teachers need to develop to enhance generational exchanges and the comprehensive training of both students and teachers themselves. And this repertoire also involves self-knowledge and self-education, which is the permanent desire to improve their practice, accessing new fields in an open and critical way at the same time.
Overworked teachers are not inclined towards lengthy, strictly theoretical training disconnected from the classroom. Well-evaluated proposals generally have in common the holding of regular, short meetings, with space for observation and exchange between peers; activities that can be tested immediately in the workplace; and trainers who speak with teachers, not to them.
Overworked teachers are not inclined towards lengthy, strictly theoretical training disconnected from the classroom.
It is also advisable to assume coherence between what is announced and what is done, practicing with teachers what is expected of them with their students. It is paradoxical, for example, to talk about project-based learning, self-assessment, and group work when the training they receive reproduces the same structure of expository classrooms, standardized assessments, and exclusive recognition of individual effort.
How teachers learn best
Science teaches us, among many other things, that adults learn best when new knowledge is anchored in something they already know, when there is room for reflection, and when learning has immediate practical application. New Zealand researcher John Hattie, whose meta-analysis of hundreds of studies on school effectiveness has become a global benchmark, showed that teacher professional development only produces a consistent effect when it is continuous, situated, and evidence-driven, and not occasional and generic.
Science teaches us, among many other things, that adults learn best when new knowledge is anchored in something they already know, when there is room for reflection, and when learning has immediate practical application.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that a proposal that answers these questions does not originate from an office. It needs to be built together with teachers and specialists from the so-called “learning sciences,” in the articulation of the school with laboratories, attentive to what already exists and what science has already discovered, to innovate towards what is not yet known. Consolidating this educational micro-governance is not simple, but it is a path that deserves to be followed to restore trust between the parties and ensure that, in the end, everyone is committed to the professional growth of teachers and, above all, to the effective learning of students.
