21.2 Background
Contemporarily it is widely acknowledged in the research literature that CPD, like
other educational change processes, is best approached and studied as a complex
system with multiple interrelations. Much research point to the importance of
talking about teachers’professionallearning, instead ofdevelopmentas a unidi-
rectional (and passive) process whereby teachers are given new ideas, which are
expected to change their knowledge and beliefs, and ultimately lead to new
enactments in their classrooms (Luft and Hewson 2014 ). Professional learning can
more likely be seen as a spiral in which reflection and new enactments might be
triggered when teachers identify learning opportunities/positive learning outcomes
for their students when being supported in implementing new approaches during
the CPD (Clarke and Hollingsworth 2002 ; Nielsen 2012 ). Furthermore, extant
research suggests that teacher efficacy, agency and empowerment can be crucial if
changes are to be sustainable, and that individual and collaborative efficacy seems
to interact (Bandura 1997 ). Educational change in general thus seems to depend on
initiatives at different levels of the system, and the most successful implemented
reform initiatives can be those that provide top-down support for bottom-up
development (Darling-Hammond 2005 ).
21.2.1 CPD and Professional Learning Communities
In relation to bottom-up development, Luft and Hewson ( 2014 ) emphasize that it is
crucial that CPD activities are embedded in the teachers’daily work, i.e., their
classroom teaching, and their collaboration with colleagues. There has been a shift
from mainly viewing CPD as an individualistic activity toward emphasizing a
school’s collective capacity (Little 2006 ). Research has steadily converged on the
importance of teachers’ joint work and shared responsibility in professional
learning communities (PLCs) (Stoll et al. 2006 ). Collaboration among peers and
within educational communities can take many forms. For Stoll et al. ( 2006 ), the
key characteristics of a successful PLC are shared values and vision, focus on
students learning, reflective professional inquiry, and collaboration and collective
responsibility.
Learning communities can in principle be both a team of science teachers (for
example) at a particular school, working collaboratively to reinforce, expand and
challenge their notions about teaching science, or science teachers from a network
of schools across a municipality (Luft and Hewson 2014 ). Little ( 2006 , p. 4) talks
about school districts as a context for professional learning and argues that teachers
professional learning depends both on the school’s internal resources and on its
external connections and relationships. For the purposes of this chapter,“network”
is used to describe collaboration across schools, and“PLC”is used to describe the
science team at a local school, whatever initial level and kind of collaboration we
316 B.L. Nielsen