UNESCO Brasília 2014: scalable professional development and ITL Research
A bibliographic note on the conference talk that argued professional development must stop depending on heroic individuals.
ITL Research is an independent project. It is not affiliated with Microsoft, SRI International, UNESCO, or the former Innovative Teaching and Learning Research programme.
The document
Langworthy, M. (2014). Beyond Heroes: Innovative Teaching and Learning. UNESCO ICT & Education Conference, Brasília. The material was circulated under the title UNESCO Brazil — Scalable Professional Development and ITL Research.
No verified archived copy of the file exists and no licence notice could be confirmed, so it is described here and not served. This archive does not hold a copy and does not accept uploaded copies.
The argument
The talk's title is its thesis. Innovative teaching is usually documented through exceptional individuals — the hero teacher whose classroom looks nothing like the school around it. That framing is encouraging and useless for planning: it cannot be replicated by policy, and it hides the conditions that made the individual case possible. What a system needs instead is professional development that produces capable practice in ordinary classrooms, at a scale and cost that a ministry or district can sustain.
Three implications follow, and they track the rubrics used elsewhere in this archive. Professional development has to work on task design, because the difference between basic and advanced practice is visible in what students are asked to do, not in which tools are present. It has to be continuous and embedded in the school's own cycle of planning and review, because one-off workshops change vocabulary rather than practice. And it has to reach the people who shape the conditions — school leaders and mentors — not only individual teachers.
Why the material is cited
A 2019 academic article indexed by Redalyc on technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) discussed this UNESCO presentation as a reference for the claim that professional development, rather than device distribution, determines whether technology changes teaching. The citation is bibliographic in form — a reference with an access date — which is why the expected destination for a reader following it is an exact, citable record of the material: author, event, place, year, and a stable pointer to the document itself, which is what this page provides.
How to find it
Search the exact title with the author's surname and the conference name. UNESCO conference material of this period is held in UNESCO documentation collections and in presentation archives; the abstract and title appear in citation databases even where the file is unavailable. Brazilian education repositories are another route, since the conference was hosted in Brasília and the material was circulated to participants.
Citation: Langworthy, M. (2014). Beyond Heroes: Innovative Teaching and Learning. UNESCO ICT & Education Conference, Brasília.