ENG
For its 80th birthday, a faculty that has spent eight decades preparing teachers has invited a scholar who has devoted his career to understanding what makes a good teacher and what keeps teachers in the classroom. Professor Christopher Day of the University of Nottingham will speak at the Faculty of Education, Charles University, on Thursday 10 December 2026 at 3 pm. It is a rare opportunity to hear one of the leading figures in international educational research in person in Prague.
The questions Day explores are highly relevant to Czech schools today. Some teacher education graduates never enter the profession at all, and many teachers leave within just a few years, as researchers at our Faculty point out in their project on teacher shortages, which forecasts teacher supply and demand in the Czech Republic up to 2035.
Christopher Day brings a perspective built on decades of research in many countries. His lecture is entitled Issues of Quality: Teachers' Work, Lives and Identities in the Ecology of Education. As the title suggests, he looks at teacher quality not only in terms of knowledge and skills. He is equally interested in what teachers experience in and outside their work, how they see themselves as professionals, and the environments they work in: the classroom, the staffroom, the leadership of a particular school and the wider education policy context. It is this web of mutual influences that the word "ecology" refers to.
Recognised on three continents
Christopher Day is Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham and at Beijing Normal University in China. From 2001 to 2005 he led the VITAE project, which followed 300 teachers in 100 English schools and examined how their work, lives and commitment relate to pupils' progress. He founded the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), a research network that studies what makes school principals successful in more than twenty countries, and he is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice.
His research on teachers has earned him the prestigious Michael Huberman Award for Excellence in Research on Teachers from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and holds honorary doctorates from Linköping University in Sweden and the Education University of Hong Kong. He has written or co-written many books, published in several languages, including A Passion for Teaching, Teachers Matter, The New Lives of Teachers and Resilient Teachers, Resilient Schools. His most recent titles include Why Successful Schools are more than Effective (2024) and Global Perspectives on Successful School Principalship (2025). His current work focuses mainly on teacher retention and on the leadership of schools and school trusts.
When: Thursday 10 December 2026, 3 pm
Where: Auditorium
Language: English
Free admission.
Come and hear one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary research on teachers, and bring your own questions.