Creating the right conditions

As alluded to above, the biggest message about sustainability to come out of the TPLD BES (Timperley et al., 2007) is how little we really know about the conditions that foster sustainable change. “Sustainability was not neglected in the literature, but it was treated as an article of faith rather than as a condition subject to empirical verification” (page 219). Working from a limited evidential base, the writers have identified a number of factors in the professional learning context that seemed to be associated with sustainability. These include:

• teachers having sufficient theoretical knowledge to make principled decisions about their practice;
• teachers having the skills needed to conduct evidence-based inquiry into the impact of their teaching on their students’ learning;
• leaders organising schools in ways that support teacher learning and inquiry.

An important innovation from the TPLD BES is the development of an inquiry and knowledge-building cycle for teachers that enables the “co- and self-regulated learning”¹ that they associate with sustainability. This is a process of iterative inquiry that shows how teachers can collectively and individually identify important issues, acquire the knowledge they need to solve them, monitor the impact of new approaches, and adjust practice accordingly. (See TPLD BES, pages xli–xliv.) The Conducting Inquiry chapter unpacks a similar cycle of inquiry that has been developed for ISTEs. The use of these inquiry cycles may assist ISTEs, teachers, and other educators to develop evidence-based skills of inquiry that will allow them to test the impact of new practices and construct more effective theories of practice.

Return to top