It specialises in teacher training of mathematics, chemistry, physics, psychology, geography, history, languages and others for primary and secondary schools.

[2] For a long period the institution was reorganised into a pedagogical department of Belarusian State University.

After being a part of another university for ten years the Decree of the Ministry of People's Commissars of the BSSR proclaimed the Pedagogical Department of Belarusian State University an independent Belarusian State Pedagogical higher institution named after the Soviet author Maxim Gorky in 1936.

In 1993 after Belarus achieved its independence and in frames of the policy of the development of sovereign educational system the institute got a status of the university.

Two years later the university was renamed after the Belarusian Soviet poet Maksim Tank.