Despite massive global investment in professional development (PD), goals to improve student outcomes, including greater equity, are often unmet. In this paper, we report on a program of research, conducted over the past 20 years, which shows positive effects for both teachers and students of Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR) PD. The research, which includes randomised controlled trials, replication studies, and independent evaluation and traverses conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative analyses, highlights three components of the PD that were critical to establishing its potential for scaling in other nations. First, QTR puts pedagogy at the centre of PD. We argue that pedagogy has been widely misunderstood and overlooked in school improvement efforts. By centring pedagogy, we question the emerging consensus on “effective PD” as needing to be content-focused and argue for additional theoretical and empirical work on what is effective (Gore et al., 2023). The focus on pedagogy means QTR applies to teachers across grades, subjects, and at all career stages (Gore & Rosser, 2020) which contributes to the scalability of the approach, including in the resource-constrained environments facing many nations. Second, QTR attends carefully to the power dynamics – based on experience, seniority, and positional authority – which often get in the way of critical analytical work among teachers (Bowe & Gore, 2017). Underpinned by a Foucauldian understanding of power as productive and circulating (Foucault, 1988), QTR deliberately flattens school power hierarchies, creating multiple opportunities for all teachers to be heard and building trusting professional relationships. These processes empower teachers to drive the PD with minimal external input – a feature which adds to its scalability, sustainability, and impact. Third, QTR is backed by rigorous research, including four separate RCTs that collectively demonstrate (statistically significant) positive effects of the approach on the quality of teaching, teacher morale, teacher efficacy and student achievement/ attainment (Gore et al., 2017, 2021). At a time when schools and teachers are under enormous pressure, exacerbated by the pandemic and dire teacher shortages (Fray et al., 2023), we argue that investment in PD with demonstrated impact is critical and urgent. Efforts to scale QTR PD, especially across international borders as reported in the remaining papers, would not have happened without such strong evidence.

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