Preschool teachers shape young children’s development, but how their expertise evolves remains less understood. Using video-cued ethnographic interviews, a researcher studied 112 preschool educators across Japan, China, and the United States to explore what drives professional growth. The study revealed cultural differences in mentoring, collaboration, and motivation. These findings led to a new framework for understanding how early childhood teachers change, offering insight into improving teacher development across diverse educational systems.

Preschool teachers are the first educators to shape a child’s earliest learning experiences, laying the foundation for their academic, emotional, and social development. Despite the importance of their role in shaping a child’s lifelong learning trajectory, preschool teaching as a profession remains undervalued and frequently overlooked, especially when it comes to understanding how preschool teachers themselves grow and improve over time. Moreover, while other education levels benefit from established frameworks for teacher development, early childhood educators are frequently excluded from such discourse, both academically and institutionally.

To better understand and address this challenge, Associate Professor Akiko Hayashi of the Faculty of Business and Commerce at Keio University, Japan, offers a rare cross-cultural perspective on this issue. In this study published online in Comparative Education on May 14, 2025, she delves into how different systems of professional development, shaped by national culture, policy, and practice, either support or hinder the professional growth of preschool teachers in different countries. Using a method known as video-cued ethnographic interviewing, Dr. Hayashi conducted a longitudinal and comparative study of preschool teacher development in Japan, China, and the United States. This study is a part of a larger research that looks at how teachers change with experience and the factors that help them change.