On January 1st 2015 a consortium consisting of 13 Danish municipalities, the Laboratory for Research-based School Development (LSP) at Aalborg University, and the National Centre for Public Competence Development (COK) launched a school development program with the title “Program for Learning Leadership – Evidence-Informed, Achievement-Oriented Development of Schools and Professional Competencies." With its 13 municipalities, the collaboration represents a total of 242 schools (land registers), almost 80,000 students and 10,000 professionals (teachers, pedagogues, school leaders, and administrative staff), which corresponds to approximately ten percent of all Danish primary and lower secondary schools and students. The basic idea of the program is that in order to raise the quality of teaching and thus the learning achievements of students the individual and social competencies of the teachers and leaders must be improved. It is also the assumption of the program that competence development must be based on specific challenges of each individual school and group of teachers, and that competence development must be realized as a collective effort of teams of teachers and leaders in close correspondence with their professional practice. Consequently, after an extensive mapping of achievements and challenges of each school based on questionnaires to all participating students, teachers and leaders, seven specific blended-learning designed competence packages (with text based material, short videos, working questions) were launched. Each school could choose among these competence packages in order to support the specific needs of the individual school. Thus, the competence development effort was based on the following principles: • Competence development must be research based, i.e. be based on existing research knowledge about the relationship between pedagogical initiatives and the students’ learning and well-being. • Competence development must be evidence informed, i.e. informed by data concerning the students’ learning and well-being collected and analyzed as part of the program. • Competence development must be collective and based on teamwork. • Competence development must be closely connected to teaching practice. • Competence development must be rooted in the organizational culture of teachers, pedagogues and school leaders. In the presentation, the program’s capacity building model will be presented, including its assumptions of teachers as practitioners of professional judgment in a context of bounded rationality. Finally, the results from the extensive feedback from teachers and school leaders will be summarized, answering the question whether this capacity building format with its focus on linking research with practice is appropriate in a primary and lower secondary school context.

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