14 de July de 2026
If we want learning to be meaningful for students, teaching must be meaningful for educators. Therefore, valuing teachers and investing in their ongoing professional development is a primary focus. Teaching, like learning, is not merely about reproducing a given behavior, but about acting with understanding and purpose. Systemic and sustainable transformation of educational practices requires knowledge of how children—and also principals, coordinators, and teachers—learn new ways of understanding and performing their roles.
One of the main challenges in the field of Education in Brazil is to ensure that investments made in developing curricula, assessments, technologies, and teaching materials help bring us closer to the real problems faced in the classroom, given that learning should be the purpose of any education policy.
Training packages that are based on transmitting fragmented information, rather than enabling autonomy in decision-making regarding time organization and the planning of teaching situations, oversimplify the teacher’s role. Teaching is a task that requires action–reflection–action and implies knowing what to teach and why, knowing how to teach, and knowing how to assess what has been learned.
Reflecting on these issues in isolation does not promote change. However, the combined accumulated experience of researchers from different fields can contribute to the systematization of training methodologies that lead educators to appropriate conceptual tools, so that they feel confident to take the lead in improving the quality of learning. One example is the partnership between the Education Laboratory, the USP Ribeirão Preto Laboratory of Studies and Research in Social Economy, and Professor Paola Uccelli of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, which has been strengthened since 2020.
The reason that initially brought these groups together was a study focused on evaluating a model of ongoing teacher professional development, implemented through the Education Laboratory’s methodology Learning to Study Texts. Learning to Study Texts is the result of several international collaborations, including the Learning for All project, coordinated with three professors from the Harvard Graduate School of Education who make up the Language for Learning research group. This was the first effort aimed at shedding light on the challenges of learning academic language in Brazil, with support from the Harvard Lemann Research Fund. From the discussion of conceptual and methodological elements, a productive relationship began to develop among the institutions mentioned above, leading to the conception of a research agenda in the field of teacher education, bringing an interdisciplinary and articulated perspective.
In Brazil, we have a tradition in which pedagogical knowledge ends up coming along as an afterthought. In this partnership, we built a proposal in which the pedagogical scene, with its technical specificities, is at the center of the design, and the contribution of other fields composes and amplifies the foundational questions.
To truly transform teaching practice, it is not necessary to revolutionize existing practices, but rather to place emphasis on restoring the meaning of teaching in light of the objectives that the National Common Core Curriculum began to organize.