Extract from Research on Cluster and School Based Professional Learning: 2006-2010
Booklet 2- The Role of System Leaders. Maureen O’Rourke and Peter Burrows. EdPartnerships International
March 2010
3. Sustainability and scalability of approach
The question of sustainable and scalable approaches to professional learning weighed heavily on
the system leaders in this study and is identified as an ongoing challenge in the literature. One of
the goals identified for a sustainable and scalable approach to professional learning is the
development of sophisticated, knowledgeable, well-informed and confident network, school and
teacher leaders able to effectively lead learning in their own contexts.
Sustainable approaches seek to build local leading and learning capacity that becomes less
resource intensive over time. They also seek to sustain the ‘stickyness’ factor of learning, so that
innovation, responsiveness and renewal are a feature. When approaches are sustained in this
manner, they enable responses to be invented or refined locally to meet the needs of to diverse
learners in diverse contexts. Quality and effectiveness are reflected through the innovation,
creativity and excellence required to achieve these aims. Sustainability is also dependent upon
people’s understanding of complex environments, local development issues and problems that
may exist.
Scalable approaches refer to the capacity to bring quality learning to scale. In the past, scalability
has often been associated with standardisation and control through specifi-cation, with
‘sameness’ as a pathway to ensuring that everyone has access to the ‘same’ quality. This has not
been adequate in the past (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009; Darling-Hammond, 2010).
It is ‘difference’ not ‘sameness’ that needs to be at the centre of scalable and sustainable
approaches, because difference is a characteristic that all learners share (Alton-Lee, 2005). High
standards and expectations, partnership approaches that bring people together to learn and
valuing multiple pathways to achieve such standards can strengthen the sustainability and
scalability of system wise approaches. Learning architecture, such as networks and smaller
professional learning communities, provide a means for diffusion of new learning and can bring
people together in both horizontally and vertically connected ways (See Booklet 1: Transforming
the ways teachers learn). Barber and Fullan (2005) recommend multi-level systems action - that
integrates development at the central, regional, network and school community levels - as the
key to sustainable change. They note that:
Most federal and state policies focus primarily on accountability. They need instead to integrate accountability and capacity-building in a systemic manner. This means changes in the way
that system leaders conceptualize the problem, formulate corresponding policies and
strategies, and allocate resources. (Ibid p.32)
Barber and Fullan identified a number of guidelines for system leaders to assist designing for
sustainable change and educational reforms, where professional learning is an essential element
of such reforms. Widely shared and understood moral purpose is necessary to connect systems
thinking and sustainability. They refer to ‘raising the bar’, ‘narrowing the gap’ (Barber & Fullan,
2005, p. 33), treating people with respect and expecting contribution. They challenge system
leaders to communicate the big picture through interaction, not just words, so that educators in
the field can influence the message and system leaders themselves increasingly sharpen the
message as they learn through such interactions.
Fostering and supporting cross-system networks and encouraging collaboration and leading
beyond a leader’s own school are part of a sustainable approach. Within schools, expectations to
develop as professional learning communities and networks, with serious attention to
developing the next level of leaders, helps to bring learning to scale. Leaders matter at every
level, and Fullan (2005) argues that capacity building must go beyond attention to individual
leadership characteristics to provide opportunities to learn in context or ‘on the job’. Fullan
cautions system leaders to consider the capacity building implications of every policy by asking
the following critical questions:



What capacities would it take to implement this policy?
To what extent do these capacities exist in the system?
How can we promote and create capacity in the course of imple-mentation?
The financial investment in capacity building and sustainable approaches causes some tension for
system leaders. These approaches require more sustained and higher initial investments and if a
system only has short-term accountability measures in place as a means to determine
effectiveness, they may not be in a position to accurately determine results. Hargreaves and Fink
(2006) identify seven principles of sustainable leadership as fundamental to the future of
education: depth, breadth, endurance, justice, resourcefulness, conservation and diversity. They
point out that sustainable leadership will both create and preserve the learning and leadership of
others. In this way it develops, rather than depletes human and material resources. In particular,
their research found that leaders develop sustainability:
…by how they approach, commit to and protect deep learning in their schools; by how they
sustain themselves and others around them to promote and support that learning; by how they
try to ensure the improvement they bring about last over time, especially after they have gone;
by how they consider the impact of their leadership on schools around them; by how they
promote and perpetuate ecological diversity rather than standardised prescription in teaching
and learning within their schools; and by how they pursue active engagement with their
environments (Hargreaves & Fink, 2003, p. 10).
Positioning teachers and leaders as reflective, researchful professionals also emerged strongly
from both our local and the international research as essential to sustainable and scalable
approaches. Unless we increase the ‘Locus of Power’ in learning (see Booklet 1) with a balanced
weighting afforded to classroom teachers, it will be difficult to sustain and scale learning. This
means broadening attention beyond the ‘craft practice’ or ‘how’ of teaching to embrace
‘reflective’ and researchful practice that develops teachers’ capacities for ‘observation, analysis,
interpretation and decision-making linked to data about children’s learning’ (Alton-Lee, 2005, p.
4). The development of evidence informed inquiry skills was identified by Timperley (2008) as a
key to maintaining the momentum of new learning and sustaining improvement in student
outcomes. Such inquiry must attend to both the external literature as well as the internal
context to ensure sound foundations of professional knowledge and know-how.
Our research found that professional learning that developed sound theoretical and conceptual
knowledge together with processes for more effective teacher collaboration was more effective.
This meant that the skills of dialogue and other meta-cognitive capacities for deep understanding
were attended to. Learning was also directed towards strengthening the local development of
sustainable learning communities where teachers’ own educative purposes were inspired and
mobilised .
The NZ BES research strongly recommends that systems create and embed partnership
approaches to iterative research and development to both strengthen and build their internal
capacity to sustain quality learning. This means shifting the role of research beyond evaluation to
play a more cumulative, developmental role in designing professional learning approaches.
Rather than only attending to prescribed outputs or outcomes of programs, Alton-Lee (2005)
recommends a ‘health-of-the-system’ perspective to inform sustainability factors:
…in which there is a broad concern with how infrastructure, wider policy settings and
interactions amongst the multiple communities within an education system contribute to a
system that is functioning effectively for all its learners’ (Ibid p. 9).
The concept of scalability therefore needs to be considered in terms of connected capacity
building, agency and accountabilities that can make the most of professional knowledge and
know-how. Developing the capacity of regional learning networks, where leaders enable
‘networking’, ‘netwalking’ and collaborative knowledge building in both vertically and
horizontally connected groupings has the power and potential to diffuse learning and innovation
across a system. These collaborative endeavours that create new opportunities for different
kinds of dialogue and ways of working can themselves become ‘a transformational process’ that
deepens collective understanding of how to ensure success for every learner.
In the next section we provide examples of Victorian capacity building approaches that illustrate
how system leaders have designed with sustainability and scalability in mind.