The COVID-19 pandemic substantially disrupted teachers’ work environments, requiring educators to rapidly adapt to distance and hybrid instruction while navigating new digital tools and instructional practices. Prior research indicates that these disruptions increased teachers’ workload, stress, and professional demands (Mankki & Räihä, 2022; Gunnþórsdóttir et al., 2021). At the same time, some studies suggest that teachers expanded collaboration with colleagues to cope with these challenges and to exchange instructional resources (Anis, 2024). These developments raise an important question for the post-pandemic era: did teachers become more isolated in their work, or did collaborative professional practices strengthen?

Using data from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 and TALIS 2024, this study examined changes in teachers’ professional learning, professional collaboration, and perceived workload before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we investigated whether teachers’ reported participation in professional learning, collaboration with colleagues, and perceived workload differ across the two survey cycles. Second, we examined whether the relationships among collaboration, workload, and teacher well-being have changed over time.

Prior to comparing structural relationships, measurement invariance across TALIS 2018 and TALIS 2024 was tested to ensure the comparability of constructs across the survey cycle. A mediation model was then estimated in which professional collaboration was associated with teachers’ perceived workload, which in turn predicted teacher well-being, operationalized as job satisfaction or intention to leave the profession. Multi-group structural equation modeling was used to compare these relationships between pre-pandemic (TALIS 2018) and post-pandemic (TALIS 2024) contexts.

The findings contribute to understanding how collaboration functions as an organizational resource supporting teacher well-being in the post-pandemic educational environment.