The current trends in German school politics, to realigne teachers from teaching to the learning outcomes of students in the classroom, is an emerging field of educational research. Research and development of subject related didactics as well as supportive systems of teacher in-service education are challenged together at the same time. The policies of schooling and education, to set up standards for education in central subjects in order to raise the quality of schools, is influencing change within the whole texture of education, expecially in the professional work of teachers. Many teaching competencies can be taught and learnt during pre-service teacher education. Most of the teaching expertise has to be developed during in-service endeavours and within collegial learning environments. Thus one of the major questions is how teachers will be involved in procedures of change, how they will follow what policy has stated, and which kind of support enables them to develop new perspectives on their professionality. Our experience since 2004 concerning the subject religious education can be taken as an example of "soft" subject development in politics, educational research, and classroom practice of teachers. Subject related didactics (like History, Politics, Religion) lack a research tradition in classrooms. Competence models of learning outcomes are not yet developed, and it is difficult to design empirical research on soft skills which are basic goals of learning in these subject, like “preparedness for responsibility” or “empathy for helping” or “hopefulness”. The paper consists of two parts: (1) We describe the process of developing a model of religious competencies. Strategies how professional and political acceptance has been provided for give notion to the dynamic context of change. Major concern was to construct a model of religious competencies which may serve as a guideline for further development. We defined competencies as a subject related potential to solve problems in different settings of personal and societal life by means of religious reasoning. In a multi-religious context of the German society religious education is seen as an important factor of education in schools. (2) The implementation of the competence model into pilot classrooms is conducted in an ongoing research and development project, questioning how teachers can learn to develop and/or adopt evaluative and diagnostic moments which have a certain impact on their teaching practice. In addition the implementation project helps to clear which kind of professional support is needed. Conceptual elements of the in-service support are continuity, cooperation within a professional community, and reflective approaches to the teaching practice by means of students’ learning outcomes. The participating teachers construct elements of the curriculum in religious education, searching for indicators for religious competencies on different levels. The accompanying research is focusing on the participant teachers' patterns of reasoning and structuring their orientation on students' competencies. How do they successfully arrange the two-sided didactic perspective on stimulating certain religious competencies by organising an ambitious learning environment?

Data are collected by means of peer review documents, process descriptions (field notes) and audio-taped teacher group sessions. Qualitative research methods are applied to document analysis and analysis of focus group discussions via “Documentary Method” (Ralf Bohnsack).

Preliminary results are reported from research in progress. They are interpreted as contributing to different philosophies of education and learning theories.