Educator Preparedness and Teachers' Self-Efficacy for Culturally Diverse Classrooms: A Multicountry Analysis of TALIS...

Teacher readiness is widely regarded as central to inclusive education, yet evidence is limited on how different routes to that readiness, initial teacher education versus continuing professional development (PD), relate to teachers' confidence in diverse classrooms. This study examined the associations of inclusion-focused PD participation and initial-training preparedness with teachers' self-efficacy for teaching culturally diverse classes, and with classroom climate, across a large set of education systems.

Using the OECD TALIS 2018 lower secondary teacher database (153 682 teachers across 47 countries), self-efficacy for culturally diverse classrooms was the primary outcome and orderly classroom climate was the secondary outcome. Exposures were a count of inclusion-relevant PD topics and a composite of initial-training preparedness for mixed-ability and multicultural teaching. Estimation was design-based, using final teacher weights for point estimates and balanced repeated replication for standard errors, with country fixed effects; the multilevel structure was quantified with empty-model intraclass correlations and confirmed with a weighted mixed-effects model.

Roughly a third of the variance in diversity self-efficacy lay above the teacher level (country ICC ≈ 0.13; school ICC ≈ 0.18), confirming the need for clustered estimation. In the fully adjusted model (72 503 teachers, 45 countries), both exposures were positively associated with diversity self-efficacy, but initial-training preparedness showed roughly twice the association of PD participation (β = 0.20 vs. 0.10; both p < 0.001). The same pattern held for orderly classroom climate (β = 0.11 vs. 0.07; both p < 0.001) and was robust across sensitivity analyses.

Across diverse education systems, teachers' readiness for culturally diverse classrooms was more strongly associated with how well their initial preparation had equipped them than with later participation in inclusion-focused PD. Strengthening the diversity and inclusion content of initial teacher education may be at least as important as expanding in-service training. Findings are cross-sectional and associational.