Research School Network: Is Professional Learning the Key to Implementing Change? By Adam Kohlbeck, Director of Teacher Quality at Chiltern Learning Trust

The education sector is at a point of significant change. With the SEND White paper (Department for Education, 2026) following hot on the heels of the Curriculum and Assessment Review (Department for Education, 2024) and a new Ofsted framework (Ofsted, 2025) thrown in for good measure, schools are facing the task of developing their approaches to a range of day-to-day and strategic practices.

Professional learning has always been about changing teacher practice for the benefit of pupils, but in the current climate, it’s also about shifting mindsets and practices to best fit sector-wide changes to curriculum, SEND and accountability. The potential for professional learning to drive how schools implement change means that now, more than ever, it warrants our thought space.

First, how can professional learning bring some much-needed coherence to the current climate?

Knowing your (professional) self: exploring professional identity

Change is driven by people (Kotter, 1996). People in education tend to have professional identities shaped by their personal values and beliefs about the purpose of education (Hargreaves, 1994). This professional identity is important because it fuels the decisions that teachers and leaders make (Beijaard, et al, 2004). For many, professional identity remains hidden and tacit. We know it exists, and we have a sense of what is important to us. But we often find it difficult to articulate why.

Let’s recap the theory so far: Change is driven by us as professionals. Professional Development is what we hope leads to change in teacher practice. When teachers are asked to make a change, they consider this through the lens of their professional identity. This consideration process is largely tacit.

What this set of assumptions leads us to is the importance of starting any professional development cycle with an opportunity for teachers and leaders to surface and consider their own professional identity. How might we do this?

Map your professional identity

Teachers and leaders can map their professional identity. Here’s my example…

I mapped this backwards by asking myself what the key professional things most important to me are. I settled on vulnerability, being evidence-informed and having a deep commitment to educators helping other educators. I then thought about two or three key points in my career where I felt these parts of my professional identity may have been formed. I won’t go into the detail of what happened at each point in my example in the interests of protecting my word count! I think the concept is clear though.

How does this help?

By making everyone’s professional identity explicit, to themselves but also to others (Wenger, 1998), we can ensure that when actions or initiatives are suggested, people understand their instinctive reactions to them. For example, if I worked in a school where case sampling was suggested as a means of better understanding student experience, I would be very supportive. By understanding my professional identity, I would then understand that my support is rooted in my commitment to evidence-informed approaches, as case sampling is a great way of gathering reliable evidence about student experience.

Likewise, if I were in a school where formal lesson observations were being discussed, I would understand my opposition through the lens of it having an emphasis on judgment rather than development (which would not chime with my commitment to the development of others).

So, one way we can use professional learning to implement change is by helping teachers and leaders better understand themselves as professionals and, therefore, their responses to strategies for implementing change.

Once we move past the initial response stage, how might professional learning build understanding of what change might actually look like?

Alignment rather than conformity

Very often, professional learning focuses on pinpointing precisely what the desired change looks like (Timperley, 2008). This is a bit like trying to hit the bullseye on a dartboard.

Let’s think of an example. A leader might try to implement a change in how teachers secure students’ attention during lessons. They provide one clear and explicit model that involves them standing at the front, counting down from 3 to 1, scanning the room and narrating positive behaviour in between each number. The message for all is that everything within that model is equally important and the job is to get as close to the bullseye as possible with their own practice.

The problem is that there are many scenarios where the modelled strategy may not be appropriate. For example, if students are working on a silent independent task or if students are 4 years old. In both of these cases, an alternative technique that serves the same purpose might be more appropriate.

A better approach is to explore scenarios that serve the same purpose but achieve it in different ways. For example:

Purpose: Secure student attention

Giving teachers multiple scenarios linked to the same purpose and asking them to plan appropriate responses means that instead of aiming for the bullseye, we are building an accurate picture of the whole board, where its boundaries are and how each part of it contributes to the whole (Klein and Wolf, 1995).

This helps teachers to understand that when implementing a change, it isn’t the observable features of their practice that are the measure of success but rather how closely aligned their actions are to the needs of the moment. This helps to cultivate a sense of adaptive practice that underpins the change that sits at the heart of the White Paper and the Curriculum and Assessment Review.

Once teachers have fully understood the proposed changes, their intuitive responses to them, and the full meaning of what the change might look like in different scenarios, the challenge becomes sustaining the change.

How can professional learning continue beyond the in-person session itself?

Sustaining change: focus on the ​‘main thing’

We talk a lot in schools about monitoring practices. Often, monitoring rationale can be flawed because we are looking for the impact of an initiative that is likely to take much longer to take hold (Fullan, 2007). What we can do is repurpose many of the traditional monitoring mechanisms in schools to focus less on short-term impact and more on creating opportunities to remind teachers of the ​‘main thing’.

Implementing change is difficult because there are so many competing priorities so the job of great professional learning is to have built in frequent opportunities to remind people of what the most important thing is at that time.

How might we do this? Let’s imagine a professional learning session has happened in week 1 of the half term and another one is planned in week 4. Let’s look at some activities that could take place in the other weeks of the half term to keep that desired change front and centre.

In this example, the professional learning continues between the focused whole-staff sessions simply by reminding teachers of what is currently the ​‘main thing’. This strategy is important because it brings coherence to everything that goes on in school from day to day. There is a purpose that is evident to teachers, helping to sustain change over time.

Closing thoughts

At a time in education when there is little evident coherence, it is incumbent on school leaders and leaders of professional learning to create it. How professional learning is delivered, followed up, and revisited across other whole-school activities is a key mechanism for doing so.

Implementing change is challenging. A well-crafted strategy for professional learning helps us meet this challenge.

References

Beijaard, D., Meijer, P.C. and Verloop, N. (2004) ​‘Reconsidering research on teachers’ professional identity’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(2), pp. 107 – 128.

Department for Education (2024) Curriculum and Assessment Review, London: Department for Education. Available at: GOV.UK Curriculum and Assessment Review (Accessed: 7 May 2026).

Department for Education (2026) Every child achieving and thriving. London: Department for Education. Available at: GOV.UK Schools White Paper 2026 (Accessed: 7 May 2026).

Fullan, M. (2007) The New Meaning of Educational Change. 4^th edn. London: Routledge.

Hargreaves, A. (1994) Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers’ Work and Culture in the Postmodern Age. London: Cassell.

Klein, G. and Wolf, S. (1995) ​‘Decision-centered training’, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 39(20), pp. 1249 – 1252.

Kotter, J.P. (1996) Leading Change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Lemov, D. (2010) Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Ofsted (2025) Education inspection framework: for use from November 2025. Manchester: Ofsted. Available at: GOV.UK Education Inspection Framework 2025 (Accessed: 7 May 2026).

Timperley, H. (2008) Teacher Professional Learning and Development. Brussels: International Academy of Education.

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.