Rethinking professional development for out-of-field teachers through a continuum model of teacher-subject alignment

Long-standing international shortages in teachers often lead to significant numbers of out-of-field teachers: educators required or requested to teach subjects in which they lack specialist subject and pedagogical knowledge. Professional development (PD) is positioned as a means to strengthen teachers’ knowledge, confidence, and practice, yet evidence on what makes PD effective for teachers working out-of-field remains limited. This paper presents a narrative re-analysis of findings from a systematic review of international evidence on subject-specific PD for out-of-field teachers. This re-analysis complements the original review by exploring the influence of context and identity on teachers’ relationships with the subjects they teach, and the implications of this for the design of PD. We found a complex interplay between contextual realities, the evolving motivations and identity negotiations of out-of-field teachers and professional development. In this paper, we propose a new model, which shows how teachers’ relationship with the subject(s) they teach is non-static and exists on a continuum of in-, out- and close-to-field. We offer this model as a way of better capturing the dynamic complexity of teaching out-of-field, and thereby informing the design of more responsive PD for teachers working out-of-field.