Teacher Professional Development in the Era of Global Competitiveness: A Comparative Policy Analysis
Keywords:
Teacher Professional Development, Global Competitiveness, Comparative Policy Analysis, Governance Reform, Internationalization.Abstract
This study examines how teacher professional development (TPD) is reconfigured within contemporary global competitiveness agendas through a non-empirical comparative policy analysis grounded in systematic document review and interpretive synthesis. Integrating political economy perspectives, governance theory, and professional learning scholarship, the analysis investigates how national policy frameworks translate global discourses of innovation, digitalization, accreditation, and internationalization into concrete TPD architectures. Findings indicate a patterned convergence toward managerial accountability, strategic talent development, and performance benchmarking, while revealing substantial variation in governance models, regulatory intensity, and the scope of teacher agency. Structural tensions emerge between audit cultures and pedagogical transformation, digital ambition and infrastructural capacity, and economic efficiency and professional identity. The study demonstrates that policy coherence depends on the capacity of national systems to mediate competitiveness narratives through culturally responsive and context-sensitive implementation strategies. By advancing an integrated analytical framework, the research contributes theoretically to the study of global education reform and offers a transferable conceptual foundation for future empirical investigations of teacher professional development under competitive global conditions.
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