Where does teacher professional learning happen?

Date: 15 Sep 2026

An ethnographic inquiry into learning spaces of health and physical education teachers.

Ask most teachers where their best professional development happened, and few will point to a scheduled workshop. New research following health and physical education (HPE) teachers in a New Zealand secondary school suggests they'd be right to look elsewhere.

Han, Philpot and Ovens (2026), published in the European Physical Education Review, spent 20 weeks embedded in a Auckland secondary school – observing lessons, sitting in staffrooms, and interviewing five HPE teachers – to understand where and how professional learning actually happens. Their findings challenge a common assumption in education: that professional learning is something that happens to teachers, at scheduled times, in designated rooms.

Instead, they found something far messier, and far more interesting.

Learning is everywhere – not just on the PD calendar

The researchers identified 10 distinct "learning spaces" that HPE teachers moved through in their everyday working lives, grouped into three broader categories:

Teaching spaces – the gym, the field, the classroom. Teachers learned simply by teaching: trialling new games, adjusting to the weather, managing behaviour, and reflecting on what worked. They also learned by being near each other – overhearing lessons on a shared field, or merging classes when the weather turned and picking up ideas from a colleague teaching alongside them.

School spaces – the staffroom, structured PD days, and mentoring relationships. Perhaps the most striking finding here was the power of the physical office layout. At the school studied, the HPE department worked in one open-plan space rather than separate offices. As one teacher put it:

"In the HPE staffroom, we share and talk a lot. It is hard to do work sometimes, but we would rather have it that way… I heard two teachers talking about an assessment, and even though I was not part of the conversation, I learned from it."

Meanwhile, formal school-wide PD sessions – while valuable – were often described as too fast-paced to properly absorb: "They try to get through a lot in a short time, and they do not actually allow you to have discussions," one teacher noted.

Spaces beyond school – workshops, conferences, online platforms, postgraduate study, and personal relationships. Even conversations with family members surfaced as a genuine site of professional reflection – one teacher described learning from his sister, a teacher in a different subject area, while another spoke about discussing "the political climate… impacting our teaching" with her husband over dinner.

The take-home idea: professional learning is an ecology, not an event

The authors frame this using the idea of a "micro-ecology of practice" – professional learning isn't a single event or programme, but an ongoing, distributed process shaped by where teachers are, who is nearby, and how a space is physically and socially arranged.

An open-plan office fosters incidental learning that a row of closed-door cubicles never could. A shared playing field turns every lesson into a potential observation opportunity. A five-minute conversation in a hallway can shift how a teacher runs their next class.

None of this replaces formal PD – workshops and conferences still matter, offering focused input and professional networking that everyday spaces can't provide on their own. But the study is a reminder that the informal infrastructure of a school – its layout, its rhythms, its relationships – deserves just as much intentional attention.

A question for school leaders

If some of the richest professional learning is happening in the spaces schools don't formally plan for, it raises a genuine design question for leadership teams:

- Are we investing in the spaces where learning actually happens – or only in the ones that are easiest to schedule and measure?

It might be worth asking how your school's physical layout, staff routines, and mentoring structures either support or unintentionally limit this kind of everyday, incidental learning.

Read the full study

Han, J., Philpot, R., & Ovens, A. (2026). Where does teacher professional learning happen? An ethnographic inquiry into learning spaces of health and physical education teachers. European Physical Education Review. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/1356336X261470230