The importance of teachers’ professional development

We know mathematics textbooks and classroom pedagogy are crucial in students’ learning of mathematics. However, to support high-quality mathematics textbooks and to promote effective classroom pedagogy of teachers, we also must support teachers, since teachers play a most important role in improving the quality of teaching and students’ learning. Traditionally, people often view having obtained pre-service training and gained a teaching qualification, is enough for being a teacher. Nowadays, there are more and more people who think this is not so. Accordingly, teachers’ in-service training and/or continued professional development, we call CPD, have also received increasing attention in many countries, including many Asian countries such as Singapore, China, Japan, and Korea. Below we should introduce the CPD practices in Singapore and in China or Shanghai.