5. Conclusions and implications
Factors supporting sustainable development seem to be about building a scaffold around the teachers’
collaborative inquiries, like the QUEST-rhythm, securing the meeting between research-based knowledge and
practitioner knowledge, and supporting teachers’ enactive mastery experiences.
The QUEST-rhythm was perceived by the majority of the teachers as supporting changes both in relation to new
enactments in their individual classrooms, and in relation to collaboration in the PLC. Furthermore the rhythm was
positively referred to both by teachers reporting a high degree of changes in collaboration and by teachers at schools
with slower/less significant changes. In general research-informed “models and tools” seemed to play a significant
role in mediating and scaffolding individual and collaborative inquiries. This was in particular true for quite simple
“models” like using a term easy to remember, “IBSE”, when talking about inquiry-based methods, collecting pre
and post teaching annotated drawings as an assessment method, and using a learning progression visualized as a tree
to support discussions about student learning in the PLC. These tools and models, and the guided teacher-inquiries,
apparently facilitated teachers’ practitioner knowledge moving from tacit to shared.
So, both a firm structure like the QUEST-rhythm framing local inquiries, and a few simple but effective tools and
models growing to be a collective knowledge base seemed determent for the relative success of phase 1 in QUEST.
There are however still QUEST-schools with a crucial need for support e.g. from school leadership.
Looking forward sustainability of changes initiated in phase 1 might depend on sustained activities following a
kind of rhythm. Institutionalization and the fading of external support in phase 2 in QUEST might therefore not be
about fading structure, but more about a change in who is responsible for initiating and steering activities following
the QUEST-rhythm. Based on the findings from phase 1 it seems important to continue the use of a quite structured
rhythm to support the local capacity building (Darling-Hammond, 2005), i.e. continuingly scaffolding collaborative
inquiries into student learning in science.