Practices such as formal focused professional dialogue groups, coaching conversations, mentoring conversations and professional learning staff meetings have been taken up in schools and pre-schools as part of long-term action research and development activities to improve the learning and teaching practices. The development of relational trust has…

Action research can be understood as a complex interplay between local circumstances and local research traditions, embedded in their turn in local intellectual-philosophical traditions, national as well as international. Because of this interplay it is questionable whether it would be particularly fruitful to look for 'typical local forms of…

In this paper we show how practices of professional learning and practices of leading can be understood as related in ecologies of practices. We will present findings from an international empirical research project that directs us to the connectivity between professional learning and leading practices that emerged as "adventitious",…

This paper explores and challenges the rationale for current, mainstream approaches to teachers' continuing professional development (CPD) within schooling systems. Such approaches are significantly influenced by neoliberal and managerial pressures, evident in advocacy for generic, individualistic models of teacher learning, often focused on…

This article describes a national school improvement project involving five compulsory schools for hard-of-hearing pupils, located in different parts of Sweden. Using action research, the teachers tried to change the communication patterns among the pupils by changing their own classroom practices, In this process the teachers tested and used…

Swedish teachers are currently expected to become more involved in school improvement based on the findings of research. One of the main goals of this work is to develop practice in its own contexts. Teachers become involved in action and research or, in other words, the combination of practice and theory. A central issue in this work is whether…

Local responsibility for school development in Sweden has led to new possibilities for teacher improvement. This paper looks at using the potential of action research generated by the decentralization for the inservice training of teachers. Decentralization offered opportunities for inservice development work through special funding for projects,…

Describes a project that looked for new forms of inservice training that would be more in line with teachers' own ideas about developing their method of teaching. The process emphasizes letting teachers control their own inservice training and letting the problem, not the method, guide teacher development. (SM)