In today’s complex world, our quality of life depends on the knowledge and skills of professionals. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world in a dramatic way, with millions of casualties and a lot of human suffering, but how much more disastrous would it all have been without the professional expertise, dedication and indefatigable diligence of medical doctors, nurses and biomedical researchers who provided the world with effective vaccines? In everyday life, when we cross a bridge we unreservedly trust the knowledge and skills of the civil engineers who designed and constructed it, or when we consume our daily meals we implicitly put confidence in the farmers and the bio-engineers who produce and process the food. Scientific knowledge has penetrated many spheres of life and has transformed work into knowledge-intensive professional activity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated yet again how vital a strong and updated knowledge base is for tackling transformational challenges. Constant changes, including abrupt transformations, are a likely scenario for the future of education. As societies and technologies constantly evolve, teachers must innovate teaching methods and pedagogies. Teachers need to be empowered to keep up with these changes and to use educational transformations to innovate teaching. For this, teachers need to be owners of deep professional knowledge, who constantly update their knowledge and skills.

The status of teaching as a profession has long been under scrutiny. Critics have commonly argued that teaching lacks a common body of knowledge that informs practice. This chapter sets the scene for an in-depth exploration of teaching as a knowledge profession. It presents arguments for considering teaching a full profession with teachers’ pedagogical knowledge as its main pillar. The chapter also provides some examples of policies and practices that education systems have implemented to improve the knowledge base among the profession. It emphasises the role of empirical data in guiding such improvement processes and the need to go beyond the existing evidence. The final section explains the choice of topics covered in this publication.

A better understanding of teacher knowledge and effective means of promoting it is of value for both education systems and practitioners. An international study of teacher knowledge can play a key role in sparking greater attention for the topic and making education systems, schools and teachers part of a global education community determined to strengthen knowledge-based and evidence-informed practices in schools. This is the ambition of the new Teacher Knowledge Survey assessment (TKS) module. This chapter provides an overview of the module, which will collect international comparative data on teacher knowledge in the next cycle of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). The chapter describes its aims and design as well as its conceptual underpinning and instruments.

This chapter addresses the questions of how to explore the knowledge and skills teachers need for effectively integrating technology in their teaching in an international study. It begins by underlining the importance of including technology-related knowledge in an assessment of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge for teaching in the 21st century. Then, it outlines the type of knowledge and skills teachers need for effectively integrating technology in their teaching and how these can be measured across countries. Drawing on previous research, different measurement approaches will be discussed. Despite a focus on teacher knowledge, the chapter includes suggestions for exploring teacher knowledge in the broader context of teachers' overall conditions, attitudes, and application of technology in teaching practice.

Schools around the world are recognising the importance of preparing teachers for working in culturally diverse classrooms. This chapter first summarises demographic and academic rationales for multicultural education, before presenting an overview of how the movement has evolved with a stronger focus on equity and social justice. Given the importance of teacher preparation in multicultural education, this chapter discusses potential survey questions and key trade-offs with assessments that may need to be considered. This chapter concludes with implications for policy, practice, and research that advocates for critical forms of multicultural education to address inequality.

What do teachers need for knowledge-based practice? This is a key research question of great relevance to policy and practice. The chapter highlights the role of teachers’ practice-based knowledge and situation-specific skills for transforming general pedagogical knowledge into effective practice. It also provides an overview of the state-of-the-art on measuring such knowledge and skills through contextualised measurements, including the suitability of different approaches for an international large-scale teacher assessment.

This chapter is dedicated to the learning opportunities that enable knowledge-based practice of teachers. It also contributes ideas for measuring such learning opportunities along the teaching career, drawing on existing cross-country research. This includes concrete recommendations for how to extend the TALIS 2018 teacher questionnaire and the TKS assessment module for an in‑depth study of teachers’ opportunities to learn general pedagogical knowledge in future cycles. The chapter ends with implications for further research on the learning opportunities needed to ensure knowledge-based practice in schools.

This chapter discusses the potential of multidimensional adaptive testing (MAT) for increasing the measurement efficiency of large-scale assessments. It outlines the building blocks of MAT and describes the configuration of a MAT design for the Teacher Knowledge Survey assessment module, including recommendations for its pilot study, field trial, and main study. A Monte Carlo simulation study is used to illustrate the potential of such a design for the module. The chapter concludes with six concrete recommendations for using MAT to transform the module’s knowledge assessment into a very modern, innovative and, at the same time, highly efficient measurement instrument.

Studying teaching as a knowledge profession, especially in an international survey, is as important as it is challenging. This publication summarised the research on key topics relating to teacher knowledge and provided many suggestions for making such a challenging endeavour a success. This closing chapter first outlines main takeaways from these discussions, embedding them into a broader discussion around researching teacher knowledge in education systems around the globe. In the end, the success of any research endeavour is also determined by the contributions made to improving policy and practice. The chapter, therefore, also discusses how research on teacher knowledge can be used for informing teacher policy and strengthening professional exchange and knowledge‑based practice in schools. Tackling these issues requires enormous efforts from everyone: researchers, policy makers and practitioners. Given the importance of a strong knowledge base of teachers for the thriving of students and societies, the effort is worth it.

Christian Brühwiler