Lecture by Christopher Day

The Faculty of Education, Charles University, is celebrating its 80th anniversary and, to mark the occasion, will welcome one of the leading figures in research on the teaching profession. Professor Christopher Day of the University of Nottingham will give a lecture entitled Issues of Quality: Teachers' Work, Lives and Identities in the Ecology of Education on Thursday, 10 December 2026, at 3:00 p.m.

What makes a high-quality teacher? It is not simply a matter of what teachers know and can do. Quality is also shaped by their experiences both within and beyond their professional lives, by how they see themselves as professionals, and by the environments in which they work – from the classroom and staffroom to the broader context of education policy. It is this complex network of interconnected influences that the term ecology in the lecture title refers to. Christopher Day has explored these questions throughout his career, and his lecture in Prague will offer insights grounded in decades of international research.

The lecture will be held in English. A link to the online stream will be added here.

Christopher Day is Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham and also holds a professorship at Beijing Normal University in China. He is an internationally recognised expert on the teaching profession and school leadership. His research examines how teachers' identities, commitment and resilience evolve over the course of their careers, what enables them to remain in the profession, and the role that school leadership plays in this process.

Together with colleagues, he led the large-scale VITAE study, which followed 300 teachers from 100 schools in England over a period of four years. He founded the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), an international research network investigating successful school leadership across dozens of countries. He is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice.

He has written or co-authored numerous books, including Teachers Matter, The New Lives of Teachers, Resilient Teachers, Resilient Schools, and Teachers' Worlds and Work. His books have been published in several languages. He received the Michael Huberman Award for Excellence in Research on the Lives of Teachers from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by Linköping University and the Education University of Hong Kong.