Chapter 21
A QUEST for Sustainable Continuing
Professional Development
Birgitte Lund Nielsen
21.1 Introduction
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) can be a crucial factor in improving
teaching, and student learning (Little 2006 ). Extant research suggests consensus
pertaining to the core features of effective CPD including content focus, active
learning, coherence, duration, collaborative activities and collective participation
(Desimone 2009 ; van Driel et al. 2012 ). More typically, however, teachers expe-
rience professional development as episodic, superficial and disconnected from
their day-to-day teaching and recurring problems of practice (Little 2006 ). Even
when CPD-programs are designed according to the mentioned consensus criteria,
there is often a lack of knowledge about the sustainability of the effects (Avalos
2011 ).
This chapter reports on a large-scale, long-term Danish CPD project called
QUEST, which was designed with the overall purpose of developing a sustainable
model for teacher CPD. Both the design of activities in the QUEST program and
their content: approaches to science education created to enhance students learning
of science, were informed by research. Furthermore, the outcomes of the CPD
activities were closely followed and subjected to periodic formative evaluation,
which made it possible to refine approaches iteratively based on teacher reflections
and new enactments, student reactions, and whether interventions were shown to
support schools in meeting their targets. In this chapter, the outcomes of the
QUEST research are condensed with a particular focus on discussing general
perspectives and implications in relation to teacher CPD and future research.
B.L. Nielsen (&)
VIA University College, Aarhus, Denmark
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters et al. (eds.),A Companion to Research in Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_21
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