Against short term professional learning

A three-year study was conducted involving teacher interviews and observation in one high school in NSW. Initially the contact between teacher and researcher came from an Australian Government Quality Teaching Program that provided 12-month funding to support teachers in professional learning. The role of the academic partner was to facilitate teachers in development of individual learning plans. Such learning plans are designed to return control of the professional learning experience to teachers. This narrative critically explores how allowing individual learning plans to develop freely produced successful outcomes that changed a teacher's pedagogy over a period of three years. However, it also shows that the time frame required to create perceptible improvement is often unrelated to the time frame of the funding available to support professional learning. The evidence is a case study of a teacher's journey - from her initial plan to increase her use of technology in her teaching to its ultimate evolution as a commitment to project-based learning -that benefited not only her own students but also her colleagues. Designing their own research projects led students, to a much greater degree than previously, to actively use the library, search the internet and write to stakeholders in order to solve problems to the questions they themselves created. Teacher colleagues observed the focus teacher's classes, asked for her assistance in their own, and collaboratively planned a showcase for student projects. This case study shows that the time for her pedagogic innovations to evolve to fruition resulted in benefits to the wider school learning community. This finding has implications for policy, as funding provisions that operate in short-term allocations give little encouragement for teachers to persist.