Mapping the Typologies of Pedagogical Practice: A Latent Profile Analysis of UAE Teachers’ Classroom Strategies

This study investigates instructional practices among 4228 UAE public school teachers using data from the 2024 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) of 15 self-reported teaching-practice items identified four distinguishable pedagogical profiles: (1) Comprehensive Practitioners (77.2%), reporting mildly above-average use of practices across all domains with no pronounced emphasis in any area; (2) Limited-Repertoire Teachers (10.1%), reporting the lowest use of nearly all practices; (3) Emerging-Repertoire Teachers (4.5%), showing a similar but less extreme pattern; and (4) Traditional Teachers (8.2%), reporting above-average classroom management alongside below-average cognitive activation and content-linking. The LPA was conducted using mclust (v. 6.1.3) in R. Classification quality was high (entropy = 0.987), although AIC, BIC, and ABIC continued to favour solutions with more than four profiles through the eight-profile models tested; the four-profile solution was retained for its comparatively high entropy, interpretability, and parsimony. The profile structure should therefore be treated as a description of self-reported practice patterns within this analysed, unweighted sample. By mapping diverse teaching behaviours, this study contributes to global discourse on evidence-based pedagogy and supports data-driven reform efforts aligned with the UAE’s national educational vision for world-class schooling.