ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how schools can create the optimal culture and conditions for supporting professional development in partnership with outside organisations. Teaching expertise can be usefully viewed as similarity-based, in which similarity is defined as increasingly shared features and decreasingly non-shared features. So expert teachers may be different in some ways but are sufficiently similar to be classified as such. Teachers who were ‘delivering the curriculum’ without fully understanding what underlay it appeared to have a grasp of the content but not of how the content is connected within the subject or the ways of knowing that are intrinsic to the subject. The role of culture in schools has clearly always been an important factor and has become vital during more challenging economic times, where leaders have been required to show greater resilience, to think more carefully about how to do more with less and to make tough decisions regarding school budgets.
