LOOKING ABROAD
Teaching is a knowledge profession OECD survey links great teaching with sound knowledge
Lisa Everitt
Executive Staff Officer, ATA
TEACHING STUDENTS TO LEARN is part art and part science, and effective teaching requires a deep body of pro- fessional knowledge. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and De- velopment (OECD) Teacher Knowledge Survey, released in 2026, offers the first international benchmark of an import- ant aspect of teacher expertise: general pedagogical knowledge (GPK). The OECD (2025) defines GPK as “the specialized knowledge of teachers for creating effect- ive teaching and learning environments for all students, independent of subject matter” (11).
Conducted in 2024, the survey included 20,000 teachers from more than 2,000 lower secondary schools in eight countries: Croatia, Poland, Portu- gal, Chile, United States, South Africa, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. The survey included questions about teacher prepar- ation, including whether participants had training in the science of learning, class- room management, lesson preparation and assessment of student learning. The survey also explored whether teachers thought their formal education prepared them to work in complex school settings. Finally, the survey asked participants about their working conditions, stress
and well-being, and intentions to stay in teaching. BETTER TEACHING, STRONGER LEARNING The survey found a strong correlation between teachers with high GPK and student achievement. The survey report (2026) notes that “Across countries, when you plot student performance on PISA against teachers’ pedagogical knowledge as measured by the Teacher Knowledge Survey, you don’t get a cloud of scat- tered dots—you get something close to a straight line. In a world of messy educa- tional debates, that kind of clarity is rare.
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THE ALBERTA TEACHERS’ ASSOCIATION
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