Supported Open Learning Ecosystems

This is a collection of illustrations related to Supported Open Learning Ecosystems (SOLE) for teacher professional learning and development. This theoretical model provides a framework for understanding, developing, and evaluating at-scale teacher development initiatives which harness open learning, face-to face support, and educational technology. 

The SOLE model identifies three nested systems which may contribute to (or block) teachers' professional development and learning—the classroom system, the school system, and the wider education system. We argue that teachers' professional learning and development takes place through participation in activity with others, in each of these systems.

• Learning through participation in professional practice (praxis), in the classroom system. Teachers learn primarily through their purposeful and agentive participation in new professional practices—particularly through teaching, usually in their classroom, with learners. Teachers' and young peoples' learning are co-located through their joint participation in classroom activity. 
• Learning through participation in communities of practice, in the school system. Teachers learn with other teachers, within their schools or between different schools. Communities of practice may be face-to-face, for example where teachers meet regularly in the same school or between several schools in a local area; they may develop online through professional learning platforms or social media; or they may be a hybrid of both online and face-to-face.
• Learning through participation in landscapes of practice, in the education system. Teachers learn through engaging with other (non-teacher) communities of practice—such as open learning platforms, teacher educators, teacher trainers, education officers, schools inspectors, academics, curriculum and textbook bodies, examination groups, NGO officers and others—which make up the wider landscapes of practice which constitute the education system.

The Supported Open Learning Ecosystems (SOLE) model causes us to ask to how teachers’ participation in activity—which is their learning and development—within any one of these systems influences their participation in activity in the others. In other words, how does professional learning and development cross the boundaries from one system to the next, and what more could be done to strengthen these boundary effects? Through the lens of (SOLE), we consider how teachers’ exploration of praxis in their classrooms can be encouraged and nurtured by top-down professional development programmes, and how professional learning can be shared from the bottom-up to other teachers in schools and to those supporting teacher development across the wider education system.

The SOLE model also highlights the importance of examining the role of the school system as a mediator between the classroom system and education system levels—examining the role of school leadership and teacher collaboration within or between schools—in the implementation of professional development programmes and in the sharing and co-development of professional learning(s) from practice(s) between teachers, schools, and the wider education system.