The RESPOND framework for promoting and monitoring sustainability indexes

The RESPOND Promoting and Monitoring Sustainability Indexes proposes an overall sustainability development framework with particular emphasis on identifying factors that facilitate and impede the sustainability of professional and school development and how facilitating factors can be increased and impeding factors reduced. The sustainability development framework proposes both a common core related to the concept of sustainability in terms of ongoing professional development and school development as a professional learning environment and how the framework and the indexes are relevant to diverse and specific situations. Part A provides checklists regarding the levels of achievement in reaching high standards for each dimension within four action areas related to the four dimensions of sustaining teacher professional profiles, sustaining mentoring and peer to peer support, sustaining the school as a professional learning environment and sustaining teacher wellbeing. The four dimensions feed into and out of each other, starting from a posing a guiding question and defining values and attitudes related to the focus. Part B is designed to help identify and reflect on particular strengths and weaknesses within the dimensions and action areas, the factors that can facilitate and impede achievement, how facilitating factors can be increased and impeding factors reduced, and what five specific actions can be undertaken to prioritize and improve weaknesses. The indexes constitute the last tool produced by the project and represent both tools for school self-evaluation and monitoring of the dimensions connected to the professional learning and development of teachers as well as the functioning of schools understood as organizations capable of institutional learning and development and thereby supporting teacher professional learning and developments. The indexes can be used flexibly to verify the presence and effectiveness of school policies and intervention strategies related to the school’s mission. At a broader level they can contribute, in an empirical and situated manner, to keeping the quality and effectiveness of schools under control, in line with what has been said by international studies on “effective schools”, which consider the self-evaluation of schools as a fundamental tool for improving their effectiveness and efficiency both in terms of developing teachers’ professional skills and increasing student learning outcomes.