A QUEST for sustainable continuing professional development

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) can be crucial in improving teaching, and student learning. Extant research suggests consensus pertaining to the core features of effective CPD including content focus, active learning, coherence, duration and collaborative activities. This chapter reports on a large-scale, long-term Danish CPD project for which all the activities were created with these consensus criteria in mind. The overall purpose has been to develop a sustainable model for CPD that acknowledges teachers’ situated learning in professional learning communities (PLCs), supports bottom-up development and embeds CPD activities in teachers’ daily work. Science teachers from 42 schools in five municipalities participated over four years in the CPD-activities. The mode of developmental learning changed according to a set schedule. This schedule included network seminars, collaborative inquiries organized by the local PLC, and individual enactments in the teachers’ own classrooms. This “rhythm” has now been institutionalized, and even though the project has come to an end, there is still networking across schools and PLC activities continue in all five municipalities. In order to assess the effectiveness of the intervention, a mixed methods design has been employed. This included a series of questionnaires, observations and interviews that were used to capture teacher reflections and new enactments, teacher collaboration and student learning. Findings reveal a positive correlation between experiencing changes in collaboration and classroom practice. Furthermore there seems to be a delayed correlation between schools with the most sustained PLC activities and student outcomes. Factors supporting sustainability are discussed, these include scaffolding the teachers’ collaborative inquiries, facilitating enactive mastery experiences and balancing school leadership and teachers’ defined autonomy.