This study reports on how one whole-school community in Melbourne, Australia fosters sustainable education (SE). The initiatives and frameworks put in place within one independent school were investigated using an in-depth case study drawing on observations conducted over 12 months. Whole-school events and four focus classes, one from each stage of schooling including the Early Learning Centre, Primary Years (Prep to 6), Middle Years (7–9) and Senior Years (10–12), were observed, school documents were analysed and semi-structured interviews were conducted with four senior staff members. Results indicate that the current concepts, models and tools in use are facilitating positive changes towards SE. We illuminate the complexities involved with enacting SE in a whole-school setting and document implications for school practice. This article offers a summary of key elements that support a whole-school approach towards SE. A vision of a whole-school approach based on educating for a sustainable future is presented that can, and did, guide school improvement and reform.

Environmental sustainability is not a new issue, but the current imperatives the global community faces call for urgent action in building powerful knowledge of ESD in ITE. We are living in the geo...

An increasing number of teaching qualifications are underpinned by the concept of clinical practice (Alter & Coggshall, 2009; McLean Davies et al., 2013) and draw on clinical education research in the health professions. Teaching as a clinical practice profession is an emergent approach in teacher education. Clinical practice is not a wholesale shift in approach; rather it is a change in perspective that has the capacity to create changes in thinking about learning and teaching. The concept of clinical reasoning presented in this paper is offered as a key element in teacher education that requires greater emphasis. By moving away from apprenticeship and craft frameworks of teaching that were prevalent in teacher education (Hoffman-Kipp, Artiles, & Lopez-Torres, 2003), this approach to clinical reasoning can produce teachers who are better able to articulate their reasoning for pedagogical choices drawing on both school-based and research-based evidence so as to improve their own teaching and improve the teaching of others.

Teaching standards are regularly described as a mechanism for improving the status of the teaching profession and as a means to develop high-quality teachers. Less attention has been paid to the difficulties of fostering professional learning when externally produced standards are imposed on teachers. This paper outlines how lesson study can inform the use of teaching standards to shift the focus to centre on learning rather than teaching to richly inform national and international views on the use of teaching standards. More specifically, it explores how lesson study was a powerful process that developed a lived understanding of teaching standards and fostered two significant discursive shifts in teacher understanding of standards: from individual to collegial activity; and secondly from statements of teaching to centring the focus on processes of learning.

The question of professional trust urgently needs closer attention in relation to teacher recruitment and retention, as this research shows it has significant bearing on the symbolic capital that may help to attract, motivate, and sustain high quality teachers. In Australian schools, teachers are frequently subject to initiatives to improve their practice, address their perceived limitations, and hold them accountable for failing students, schools, or systems. We argue that teachers, in the advent of these reforms intended to improve them, come to believe they are distrusted in their professional roles. Denying teachers the sense of themselves as capable professionals risks contributing to the problems of retention that are becoming ever more urgent in the Australian context and elsewhere in the world. This article explores the impacts of discourses and policy directions on teachers’ perceptions of professional trust. Drawing on case study data from two schools in the state of Victoria, Australia, we highlight the ways discourses of professional distrust emerge through policy directives that position teachers as ‘the problem’ in education.

: Effective professional learning is acknowledged as a key lever to improve teacher practice. However, many studies report significant variation in the effectiveness of the types of programs on offer. Recently, there has been a move from the traditional single-event, passive approach to more collaborative and ongoing forms of professional learning. Interestingly, researchers have paid little attention to understanding the experience of professional learning from the teachers’ viewpoint. This research sought to develop this understanding by following the attitudes and behaviours of a group of secondary teachers as they participated in an ongoing professional learning program. This professional learning program tracked teachers as they participated in workshops and then applied the learning to their classrooms. Our results suggest five interacting characteristics that contributed to improvements in teaching practice. These findings underpin the development of a process model of professional learning, that we call the Iterative Model of Professional Learning (IMPL).