Research on educational change has thoroughly documented that the implementation of innovative practices is challenging and can lead to diverse and often not very sustainable practices (Coburn et al., 2012; Giles&Hargreaves, 2006). Variation in implementation practices is the rule, rather than the exception, and many change initiatives can be characterized in terms of short-lived innovations with little sustainable impact (Hargreaves&Goodson, 2006; Hargreaves et al., 2009). It is precisely this variation that puts specific questions to the forefront: How can we explain that from all attempts to change a great deal does not generate the desired results over the long term? How can we warrant the sustainability of reform implementation? Depending on their theoretical position, educational researchers have been answering these questions differently, emphasizing the role of local actors (agency) or structural factors (e.g., position, routines, rules; structure) to understand the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of educational change initiatives. Recent developments within the educational change literature, however, emphasize the need for a more balanced approach in which the interplay between social actors and the structural reality in which they function is studied more systematically (e.g., Ashwin, 2009).

Over the past three decades, research on educational change was largely dominated by micro-cognitive approaches in which the meaningful interactions between actors and the innovation content were central to explain educational change processes (see Spillane et al., 2002; Van Veen et al., 2009). From their sense of professionalism, sense-making, motivation, and feeling of ownership, teachers will interpret, question, criticize, embrace, or resist the calls for change. Although this is a powerful perspective, several scholars have pointed to the limits of the micro-cognitive approaches and argued for the need to also acknowledge how teachers’ meaning making processes and actions are influenced by the school’s structural arrangements. More recently, a shift can be observed within the educational change literature from a focus on studying the role of individual actors (and individual professional learning) to the social structure in which local actors’ operate and collaborate. This tendency is visible in the increasing popularity of research into professional learning communities (Stoll et al., 2006), communities of practice (Wenger et al, 2002), teacher design teams (Voogt et al., 2015), social networks (Moolenaar, 2012), and cross-professional collaboration (Schenke et al., 2016). Powerful professional networks in which expertise and knowledge are developed and shared with one another, is often cited as a main contributing factor to successful educational reform (Daly et al., 2010).

There is already a lot of research on the impact of professional networks on the professional development of individual teachers, and the role such networks fulfill in the adoption and implementation of educational reforms (Datnow, 2012; Little, 2005). However, there is little systematic research on how teachers’ professional networks (school internal/) can be an effective way to build sustainable change within groups and school organizations: “While existing research suggests that teachers’ social networks play a crucial role, we know little about what dimensions of teachers’ social networks matter for sustainability” (Coburn et al., 2012, p.137). Following Coburn et al. (2012), we define sustainability in terms of “the degree to which teachers use reform-related practices in high-quality ways after support for these practices has dissipated” (p.140). The aim of this paper is to study the role of professional networks in the sustainability of educational change initiatives. The central research question is formulated as follows: “How, when, and under what conditions do professional networks contribute to (or constrain) the sustainability of educational reforms?”. Specifically, we will focus on the role individual actors (agency) fulfill in professional networks, as well as the structural characteristics of those networks (structure).

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