Educators and policymakers worldwide are reimagining teacher preparation through the lens of the science of learning and development (SoLD). This blog series, based on insights from EdPrepLab’s World Café webinars, highlights global strategies for aligning teaching practices with what we know about how students learn best.

Technology, workforce needs, expanding student diversity, and global challenges are reshaping classrooms—and we must transform teacher preparation to keep pace. Many schools are rethinking how learning happens in order to prepare students well for our increasingly complex, interconnected, and demanding society, shifting beyond academics to also nurture students’ identities, relationships, and lived experiences. But as schools and student needs change, teacher preparation must change too. The science of learning and development (SoLD) offers a powerful, research-based road map: Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and education, it shows how people truly learn and thrive. And just as students need these conditions to flourish, so do teachers—because the way we prepare educators directly shapes the classrooms they go on to create.

This blog launches our six-part series, Global Teaching Transformed, drawing from EdPrepLab’s international World Café webinars to highlight how educator preparation programs worldwide are reimagining teacher learning through the lens of SoLD. Each installment will explore a vital dimension of this work: designing student-centered preparation, centering practice in teacher preparation, building stronger university–school partnerships, strengthening support for novice educators, and aligning international policy with the science of learning and development. Taken together, these pieces showcase both the common challenges and the innovative responses emerging across contexts, offering a global vision for transforming teacher education so that it fully reflects what we know about how people learn, grow, and thrive.

What Is SoLD?

At its core, SoLD helps us see that teaching is not just about delivering content but about creating the conditions—through relationships, environments, and practices—that enable all learners to flourish. Because SoLD captures the universal dynamics of how humans learn and thrive, it offers a framework that transcends national boundaries and can inform teacher preparation across diverse cultural contexts. Central findings from SoLD include:

• The brain is malleable and is always developing.
• Variability in development is the norm, not the exception.
• Learning is social, emotional, and academic.
• Relationships affect learning and development.
• Students actively construct knowledge based on their experiences, relationships, and social contexts.
• Adversity affects learning—and the way schools respond matters.

These findings have been synthesized by researchers and practitioners in a set of Design Principles for Schools, which highlights five areas of practice and school structure that, when integrated and implemented in responsive ways, have been shown to optimize learning, development, and thriving.

SoLD tells us that context matters—students learn within a cultural, social, and historical context. When teacher education programs incorporate this understanding, they equip future teachers to affirm student identities and address systemic inequities. When we understand that students learn best when they feel safe, seen, and supported, we can start to see why emotional and cultural connections in classrooms matter just as much as academic content. 

Around the globe, countries are beginning to embrace this integrated view. In New Zealand, Te Ao Māori (translated to “the Māori world view”) is taught in teacher preparation, as well as New Zealand history and its colonial past. In Finland, teacher preparation includes strong foundations in child development, with a focus on collaboration and student agency. In Singapore, educators are trained to attend to students’ emotional needs as part of their professional practice. These examples—all shared in this blog series—show a growing recognition that students are not blank slates—they bring rich histories, identities, and experiences into the classroom that are canvases for teaching and learning.

SoLD for Initial Teacher Preparation

Research on teacher preparation tells us that what is good for our primary and secondary students’ learning parallels what is good for our teacher candidates. Modeling of practices by faculty for what they want their graduates to enact in their own classrooms is critical for candidate learning. This requires a deep understanding of SoLD, including adult learning theory. Far too often preparation programs are not designed with these foundational elements in mind.

In 2025, the Learning Policy Institute published a set of Design Principles for Teacher Preparation grounded in the science of learning and development to support preparation improvement and redesign. These principles provide a guide for what structures, practices, and policies should be in place to enact the science of learning and development in teacher preparation.

Preparation Programs Enacting SoLD

Many U.S.-based teacher preparation programs are using the SoLD principles as a framework to strengthen their preparation practices in both teacher and leadership preparation. For example, faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison are in the process of incorporating the principles widely across their secondary teacher education program and are already using them in their education psychology course and to inform their own core teaching practices in their fall seminar. Faculty at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee are using the SoLD principles to guide the redesign of their secondary education program. The University of South Carolina’s College of Education has just completed a new teacher education core based on the SoLD principles and is also integrating them into its expanding in-service professional learning for teachers. And SoLD-aligned teacher preparation efforts are being implemented well beyond the United States. For example, Chile’s University Diego Portales and University Alberto Hurtado are currently leading an international group of scholars and practitioners focused on the use of SoLD in leadership preparation. These efforts show how the design principles can foster innovation in preparation as programs engage in continuous improvement.

To prepare globally minded, equity-focused teachers, preparation programs need to be paving the way through modeling of the practices we want to see in primary and secondary school settings. SoLD design principles for teacher preparation is a framework that provides a unifying structure to much of the work that is being done around the world. The principles also serve as a roadmap for those programs that desire to be more tightly aligned in their practices with the science of learning and development to create and nurture schools and learning environments in which students learn and thrive.

At the heart of every conversation about teacher preparation is a simple truth: Students cannot thrive unless their teachers are equipped to teach in the ways students actually learn. Science has shown us that learning is social, emotional, and academic—and that context, identity, and relationships matter just as much as content. When preparation programs embrace these insights, they give future teachers the tools to create classrooms where all students feel safe, supported, and challenged to grow. Aligning teacher preparation with SoLD isn’t just an improvement—it’s a necessity if we want schools that truly meet the needs of every learner.

Maria E. Hyler is Director of the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), Washington, DC, Office and a Senior Researcher at LPI.