Today schools are confronted with many external political and social demands and are working on different themes relating to instructional, organizational or professional improvement to make the grade. Consequently schools are facing the challenge to find and use similarities and synergy between the several themes to be able to fulfil all those aims. Although we know how important the whole school approach (Conway, 2015) is in school improvement, to engage the whole team in changes is a real challenge. One reason is that not all themes are reasonably concerning the whole staff, but a special discipline or profession. In contrast interdisciplinary themes like environmental education development are chances for teams to collaborate and implement changes in a whole-school-approach.

Switzerland declared Education for Sustainable Development as a main challenge for the schools in the upcoming years. Therefore in canton Zurich a program was started in 2011 to foster environmental education in primary, secondary and vocational schools that could apply to the program. Similar to other reform programs it consisted of different elements to support the change process in schools: build a school network, provide professional development and counselling, help to clear aims, give financial support, etc. One important point was, that all schools participating in the program had to mandate one person (facilitator) from the school team to lead the project and to transfer new knowledge connected to environmental education into the team.

From the perspective of school improvement all those elements seem to be useful in succeeding with the program. However the characteristics of the schools, the school context can facilitate or impede the effects of the program. Schools have more or less capacity to use those elements and enact changes (Stoll, 2009; Hargreaves, 2011). We conceive change as a socially and interactively constructed process (Weick, 1995; Jansson, 2013; Bormann, 2013). It means that the process is not straight forward and difficult to steer. In this case the main tasks of leadership are influencing the process of sensemaking (Spillane et al., 2002) and supporting organizational learning (Robinson et al., 2008; Fullan, 2014). Crucial to school improvement processes in this study seemed to be the role of the facilitators and the distribution of leadership tasks and roles between school leaders and teachers leaders (Tian et al., 2015; Harris et al., 2007; Leithwood et al., 2009)

The schools were free to decide how to use these support elements to achieve their goals. Consequently school specific development processes were expected at the beginning. Therefore the research questions addressed not only the perception and use of the support elements but also school specific factors:

1. What is the school specific context in which the program is implemented?
2. How do the schools perceive the mentioned elements and their influence on the implementation?
3. How do the elements support school development processes?

The presentation focusses on results of the qualitative part of the study based on interviews with the facilitators in the participating schools as well as the school leaders. The interviews were conducted to understand better how schools use the support elements of such a program for their school improvement and how they integrate the external impulses into their school specific goals.

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