Teacher professional development does not happen in a single room or on a single day. It happens through training, but it also happens through mentoring, through conversations with peers, and through the everyday work of trying something new in a classroom and adjusting it until it works. Research on professional development has moved in this direction as well. Rather than treating a workshop as a one-off event, it is increasingly understood as an ongoing process, one that draws on collaboration, reflection, and sustained support to bring about real change in the classroom. Training, in this sense, is only one part of that process. It is the part that is scheduled and bounded, with a clear beginning and end. The rest of it, the longer and less visible part, happens afterwards.

This distinction matters because it changes what support actually needs to mean. If professional development is this continuous process, then support has to work at two different moments: how a training is designed in the first place, and what exists to carry teachers forward once the training ends. This leaves an important question underexplored. 

This is the question that stayed with us in our study of classroom practices two years after the Classroom Practices to Enhance Learning Outcomes (CPELO) training. CPELO introduced active learning strategies that encouraged students to collaborate, share ideas, connect prior knowledge with new concepts, and engage more meaningfully with their learning. Mentor Teachers (MTs) delivered the training directly to school teachers, ensuring that despite its scale, every teacher could benefit from it. At first glance, teachers appreciated the training. They found the strategies useful, believed they made learning more engaging, and felt confident about trying them in their own classrooms.

Once the training ended, those same teachers returned to their own classrooms, facing the realities of their classrooms where students learn at different paces, space and time are limited, curriculum expectations do not pause, and they must constantly make decisions based on what is happening in front of them.

This is where our study comes in.

To understand what happened after the training ended, we combined a survey of 158 teachers, eight focus group discussions with teachers, mentor teachers, and principals, and classroom observations across 20 classrooms in eight schools, all conducted two years after the original training. This lifecycle approach allowed us to look not only at whether teachers remembered the strategies but at how those strategies actually showed up, or did not, once teachers were back in their own classrooms.

One example makes this especially clear. Rotating Learning Stations was a strategy that asked students to move between stations, completing a series of collaborative tasks together. Across the classrooms we visited, a version of the same story played out. Teachers wanted to use the strategy exactly as it had been demonstrated during training, and the classroom reality challenged that expectation - space was limited, desks could not be rearranged easily and managing student movement would have taken away valuable teaching time. So instead of abandoning the strategy, teachers adapted it. In one classroom, rather than asking students to rotate between stations, the teacher rotated printed worksheets between groups instead. The movement changed, but the purpose of the strategy remained the same. Students continued discussing ideas, working collaboratively, and learning from one another.

Across the classrooms we visited, teachers were doing something similar: changing the grouping, simplifying the instructions, reworking parts of an activity so that it worked for their students, their subject, and their classroom. They were not simply following the strategies step by step. They were adapting them.

This observation changed how we looked at our data. Adaptation, we realised, was not a failure to follow instructions but instead it was a sign of professional judgement. Rather than asking whether teachers were implementing the strategies correctly, we found ourselves asking a different question.

Teachers Were Not Rejecting the Training. They Were Negotiating with Reality.

Some strategies, such as Mind Maps, found their way into classrooms more easily because they required fewer logistical adjustments and could be used across different subjects and grades. Others, such as Jigsaw and Frayer's Model, were used far less frequently, particularly in primary classrooms, where teachers found them more difficult to manage because of classroom dynamics and the complexity of organising collaborative groups. Additionally, teachers found it easier to integrate learner-centred strategies into subjects such as EVS and languages, while integration into mathematics remained considerably more challenging. These findings pointed to something different: A strategy's success may have less to do with how well it was taught in training and more to do with whether the training accounted for subject-specific and grade-specific realities from the start.

If teachers are expected to translate strategies into classrooms shaped by these realities, then the objective of the training is not just to introduce new strategies but also to prepare teachers for the decisions they will need to make once that strategy meets an actual classroom. In our interviews and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), teachers told us that they wanted classroom management guidance for activities involving movement or group work, since this was not always addressed explicitly during training. They wanted subject-specific examples, particularly for mathematics, where implementation proved difficult and they wanted practical guidance on working with students at different learning levels, including children with disabilities. Support, in other words, needs to travel with the strategy, into the specific subject, grade, and classroom where it will actually be used.

The Training Is Only the Beginning

This is why teachers consistently spoke about the value of continued support after the training: classroom demonstrations by Mentor Teachers, opportunities to discuss implementation challenges, refresher sessions, and resources they could revisit while planning lessons. This kind of support helped teachers move beyond understanding a strategy to understanding how it could actually work within their own classrooms.

In our FGDs, teachers told us that the support they currently receive is largely limited to demonstrations and encouragement from Mentor Teachers and Teacher Development Coordinators, along with existing materials such as NCERT workbooks and NIPUN flashcards. These are useful, but there is little formal structure behind them. What teachers asked for was more: refresher training, follow-up sessions, handbooks and videos they could return to, and systemic changes such as dedicated activity spaces, longer class durations, and strategies built into the syllabus itself rather than layered on top of it. Mentor Teachers echoed this, asking for model videos, manuals, and stronger connections between DIETs and schools.

Meeting this need takes more than the training itself. School leaders need to create the conditions, time and space for teachers to experiment and reflect. Mentor Teachers need the opportunity to continue supporting teachers while also sharing what they see in classrooms with the wider system. The training designers need that same feedback, so that the next training reflects what teachers actually experience.

Supporting the Whole Journey

Professional development, then, is every time a teacher tries a strategy, reflects on what worked, modifies an activity, discusses a challenge with a colleague, or seeks support from a Mentor Teacher. If so, support cannot be a single intervention that follows training. It needs to run alongside implementation, for as long as teachers are still working out how a strategy fits their classroom.

This points back to the two moments at which support has to work. Firstly, the training itself needs to prepare teachers not only to understand a strategy but to see the classroom conditions it assumes and the challenges they are likely to encounter, grounded in subject-specific examples, with room to practise adapting a strategy rather than simply watching it demonstrated. Secondly, once training ends, continuous monitoring and feedback matter just as much. Every adaptation a teacher makes is information about how the training could be strengthened and not simply a check on whether a strategy is being used correctly. Training informs practice, but practice should inform training too. This means that the people responsible for supporting teachers need to keep learning from classrooms and not just prepare teachers for them. What CPELO's teachers needed was support at both of these moments: before they walked into the classroom, and long after they had already begun making it their own.

In the end, teacher professional development is not limited to a well-designed workshop. It continues as an ongoing process, one that takes place when teachers are supported once they return to their classrooms after the training ends.