This study investigates in a cross-national way the role of professional development activities as a determinant factor in teacher quality and a resource to further empower teachers to move students toward high achievements.

The purpose of study is to drawn conclusions about teachers' perception of and engagement in professional development in terms of how they are related to the system of continuous professional development inRomania, how the professional development features compare with those of other countries and what are the relevant research innovations and implications for policy and practice applications. The qualitative international data is being interpreted in the context of larger national particularities and characteristics. The consequences of social, cultural, political, economical and technological effects justify the importance of the critical evaluation of the comparative data in a national setting. The data allows an accurate comparison to be made between features of different professional development systems and validates the information in a particular national setting. 

This study attempts to achieve this goal by answering the following main research questions:

To what extent does professional development have an impact on teachers’ work/practices? In this regard the TALIS questioner focuses on how schools are implementing professional development for teachers. In national setting central standards have a bigger impact on professional development practices. Those country level factors might produce different outcomes in a comparatistic setting, which could appear as policy relevant information for an education system.   

To what extent teachers have a prior recognition of the professional development needs (content and forms)? Teachers’ perception of their own needs for professional development might reflect the most commonly offered content-types and forms of professional development; those may not cover all the specific content needs of teachers or forms of activities.  

To what extent professional development is characterized by a culture of support? Under this research question the amount of time for professional development and other experienced barriers are in focus, which prevent teachers from participating in such activities. To interpret the differences we might also refer to the particularities of the national educational and professional development system.

Theoretical approaches to teacher effectiveness have revealed a range of models, each emphasizing different types of criteria for judging effectiveness. This study considers the importance of the role of professional development in enhancing teacher quality. Professional development makes a crucial difference to school performance and its importance is frequently noted by researchers. Therefore the theoretical framework of the study is shaped by the large literature of teachers’ in-service learning models. 

Models of professional development vary in their emphasis upon whether it is the characteristics of the learner and/or characteristics of the new knowledge that determines the effectiveness of professional development.

The literature mainly emphasizes the meaning of TPD in context of educational quality, and describes professional development the most essential factor in the sense of promoting student learning outcomes and educational effectiveness. However, for decades studies of professional development consisted mainly of documenting teacher satisfaction, attitude, change or commitment to innovation rather than its results or the process by which it worked.

To sum up, the professional development of teachers is studied and presented in the relevant literature in many different ways, perspectives and contexts. But the main focus of the various studies remains to show that professional development is about teachers learning, learning how to learn and how to transform their knowledge into practice for the benefit of students’ learning outcomes.

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