Choose and Curate toward Commitment to Capable and Committed teachers (5Cs): A Set of Principles for Teacher Career Reform

Classroom teaching is complex. This means that pursuing a vision of empowered, highly respected, strongly performance-normed, contextually embedded teaching professionals who cultivate student learning requires a systemic approach to teacher career reform. One such approach is a set of principles called the 5Cs: choose and curate toward commitment to capable and committed teachers.1 Education authorities must initially choose prospective teachers based on the best available information. Education authorities should also designate the novice phase as a period of curation involving extensive support for teachers’ pedagogical development and careful identification of those teachers who are most likely to make sustained, careerlong contributions to student learning. Such teachers must be technically capable and equipped for cultivating student learning in their specific school, classroom, and curricular contexts. Additionally, teachers must also be motivationally committed to the systemwide purpose of cultivating children’s learning. After these teachers have demonstrated their capability and commitment, education authorities should make a long-term employment commitment to them.

• Education authorities must initially choose prospective teachers based on the best available information.
• Education authorities should also designate the novice phase as a period of curation involving extensive support for teachers' pedagogical development and careful identification of those teachers who are most likely to make sustained, careerlong contributions to student learning.
• Such teachers must be technically capable and equipped for cultivating student learning in their specific school, classroom, and curricular contexts.
• Additionally, teachers must also be motivationally committed to the systemwide purpose of cultivating children's learning.
• After these teachers have demonstrated their capability and commitment, education authorities should make a long-term employment commitment to them.

Classroom teaching is a complex professional craft, and teacher career structures must reflect that
The most common model of teacher careers is a civil service approach in which teachers receive permanent employment contracts from the beginning of their careers, and promotions and pay are influenced mostly by seniority. 2This career model could be effective if teaching were a straightforward task and if the most important factor in teaching quality was how much time a teacher had spent in the classroom.
However, classroom teaching is instead a complex professional craft.Classrooms are open systems.Children's experiences of the teaching and learning process are affected by many factors, such as interactions between their knowledge, the teacher's knowledge, and the content to be taught; as well as classroom-level factors such as the social and disciplinary atmosphere and every student's mood; and broader environmental factors in schools and in children's homes.Teaching is a specialised craft that requires teachers to balance all these factors to best cultivate children's learning.
The 5Cs are a set of principles that recognise this complexity: Choose and Curate toward Commitment to Capable and Committed teachers.One way in which the 5Cs recognise the complexity of teaching is by treating the novice teacher career phase as a distinct stage for developing and identifying teachers who will make the biggest careerlong contributions to students' thriving.This differs from the typical civil service approach, where identifying teachers for careerlong employment often takes place only at a single point and is only based on pre-service paper qualifications rather than in-service pedagogical capabilities and motivational commitments.Some other differences between the 5Cs and the typical approach are outlined in Table 1.
Table 1: Unlike the typical 'civil service' approach to teacher careers, the 5Cs approach recognises the distinct complexities of classroom teaching.
The typical civil service approach The 5Cs approach

Initial selection criteria
Teachers are hired based on formal qualifications and pre-service assessments (which may have little or no correlation with actual teaching capability).
Teachers are hired based on the best available measures of their potential for capability and commitment to cultivating student learning (see the 'Choose' section below for some examples).

Duration of employment contracts
Permanent employment is awarded from the beginning (perhaps after a nominal probation period).
Permanent employment is awarded after teachers have demonstrated this capability and commitment in the classroom over time.

Factors affecting teacher compensation
Almost all aspects of teacher compensationincluding the non-financial benefits of different assignments to districts, schools, subjects, and classes-are determined by seniority and/or formal certifications.
If teacher compensation is variable (which may not be the case), it varies based on contributions to student learning and to the goals of the education system.

Compensation across different career phases
Compared to similar professions, wages are relatively high early in the career and relatively low late in the career (see Box 1, Figure 1).Pensions and retirement benefits encourage teachers to remain in the profession even if they no longer feel committed to systemwide goals.
Early-stage compensation may be relatively low, to encourage voluntary separation of those who are not capable or committed to teaching.After the novice phase, compensation packages are designed to appeal the most to the most capable and committed teachers.

Similarities to other career structures
Teacher career structures are very similar to career structures in other areas of public service-and are very similar across contexts.
Teacher career structures reflect the distinct purpose and specialised technical practices of classroom teaching-and they look different depending on the context.

Box 1: One example of what the 5Cs might look like in practice
As a set of principles, the 5Cs can and should look different in different education systems.This matters because every context varies in complex ways that affect teacher careers.
However, for illustration, Figure 1 shows one possible example of what the 5Cs might look like, in contrast to the conventional civil service approach.1.The different bar heights in the lower graph of each panel are intended to show relative differences in within-system cohort sizes as teachers progress through their careers.Put differently, these different heights relate to the distribution of teacher cohorts within the system, not the total number of teachers in an education system.

Issue Brief: 5 Cs
The rest of this brief discusses each of the five Cs in turn.

Education authorities and organisations should initially choose teachers based on their potential capability and commitment to cultivating student learning
In many education systems, novice teachers are chosen for employment based on standardised indicators such as their highest educational qualification.However, these paper qualifications are not a good indicator of a prospective teacher's potential for capability and commitment to cultivating student learning.This is a particular problem in lowperforming education systems because prospective teachers have experienced inadequate teaching and learning themselves.For example, in a 2007 survey, 74 percent of Grade 6 teachers in South Africa had completed senior secondary school and above, 3 yet only 21 percent of them demonstrated mastery of the primary school maths content that they were supposed to be teaching. 4stead, education authorities and organisations should choose teachers for initial entry into the profession based on assessments and exercises that focus on classroom-relevant capability and commitment.For example, to gauge how capable an early-career teacher may be, a programme in Peru tested teachers on their ability to identify and explain students' misconceptions in mathematics. 5 Because teaching is a complex craft involving multiple skills and dispositions, selection processes should include multiple, tailored assessments rather than relying on a single assessment. 6In addition to improving the quality of the selection process, using tailored assessments rather than generic indicators can also communicate the norm that teaching is a skilled, specialised profession-which, in turn, can attract more capable candidates into the profession. 7

Throughout the novice phase, there must be ongoing attention to developing teachers' professional craft-and to identifying the teachers who are most willing and able to make careerlong contributions to children's learning
Choosing novice teachers based on pre-service characteristics is a necessary part of identifying capable and committed teachers, but it is not sufficient.Because classroom teaching is complex, it is impossible to make completely accurate predictions about how a prospective teacher will perform in the classroom until they have actually spent time in the relevant classroom context-even if the predictions are based on classroom-related assessments.Crucially, prospective teachers themselves do not have a full picture of how capable and committed they will be until they have experienced the full spectrum of challenges in real classroom settings.Under the 5Cs, the process of curation involves giving frontline classroom experience to a wide pool of novice teachers, supporting them as they adapt to its complex challenges, and facilitating their exit from the profession if they find that they are less well-suited to the classroom than they initially expected.
Besides giving both employers and teachers themselves better information about who will thrive in the teaching profession long term, a period of curation during the novice phase is also an indispensable opportunity to establish strong norms of quality teaching, both for the individual teacher and for the teaching profession more broadly.9This is particularly true when education systems allocate resources for supporting, coaching, and mentoring novice teachers.10Low-quality-or non-existent-induction and mentoring of novice teachers is a significant problem in many education systems.11

After the initial curation, education authorities and organisations should make a long-term employment commitment to those teachers who have demonstrated capability and commitment in classroom practice
Treating the novice phase as a special period for developing and identifying capable and committed teachers can be a vital starting point-but such curation would not be appropriate for later phases of a teacher's career.Instead, education authorities and organisations should offer long-term employment to teachers who have proven their contributions to student learning.This reflects a mutual commitment from employers to teachers who have themselves demonstrated their commitment to systemwide educational goals.
A long-term employment commitment matters because continuous curation is costly, whether for ministries, schools, and students, or for teachers themselves.Keeping teachers on short-term, performance-based contracts throughout their careers would lead to constant turnover across the entire pool of teachers.Such turnover can generate significant coordination problems in allocating teachers to schools and classrooms, which affects student learning. 12om a teacher motivation perspective, careerlong curation-rather than curation followed by commitment-would mean that teachers face permanent job insecurity, which can be highly demotivating.It can also communicate the message that teachers are disposable or, at least, that they are not highly valued as professionals, which can be damaging for professional norms. 13ryadarma, D. 2022.Selecting Teachers in Indonesia: Predicting Teacher Performance using Pre-Employment Information.RISE Working Paper Series.22/098.https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-RISEWP_2022/098.

Commitment
Issue Brief: 5 Cs

Effective teachers need to be technically capable and equipped for cultivating student learning in their specific school, classroom, and curricular contexts
Students deserve teachers who are technically capable in the complex task of classroom teaching.Teaching capability includes a range of competencies and knowledge.For example, teachers must master not only content knowledge about the subjects that they are teaching to their students, but also pedagogical content knowledge about how best to help students to understand-and avoid misunderstanding-the content in question. 14Effective teachers must also be skilled in maintaining a supportive classroom climate. 15ditionally, teachers must also be capable of meeting the diverse academic and socioemotional needs of the children in their classes. 16This can be a particularly important capability in the many education systems where formal curricular expectations are far ahead of most students' levels of academic preparation. 17Aligning classroom instruction with both systemwide learning goals and individual children's needs is a technically demanding competency.

Teachers also need to be motivated and committed to the systemwide goal of cultivating student learning
Besides technical capability, teachers' motivational commitment to systemwide educational goals is also crucial.Such commitment matters because a shared sense of purpose can be a powerful avenue for change in low-performing education systems. 18achers' sense of commitment to cultivating student learning also matters because the complexity of teaching means that it can be both inefficient and ineffective for education authorities and organisations to try to extensively monitor whether teachers are fulfilling the multiple goals of the education system every day (e.g., developing children's cognitive skills, but also their sense of civic identity).Rather, employers should select and equip capable and committed teachers and to trust them to pursue systemwide goals with some baseline monitoring. 19Moreover, teacher commitment matters because the goal of cultivating children's learning demands not only technical skill, but also socioemotional competence and effort. 20

Figure 1 :
Figure1: Unlike typical civil service approaches, teacher career structures that apply the 5Cs are designed such that each phase of the teacher career cycle optimally serves systemwide goals 2. Panel (b) shows a hypothetical application of the 5Cs (out of many possible applications of these principles); adapted from Figure 9 in Pritchett, L., and Murgai, R. (2006).Teacher Compensation: Can Decentralization to Local Bodies Take India from the Perfect Storm Through Troubled Waters to Clear Sailing?India Policy Forum, 2006-07.https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2006_pritchett.pdf.