In today’s digital era, technology has been noted to offer unprecedented possibilities, including those that support quality of teaching. The ability to learn anywhere and at any time and pace has significantly shifted how we conceptualise learning and organise education (European Commission, 2012). However, Darling-Hammond (2015) reminds us that not much of the existing evidence-based approaches is used in the realms of policy-making and school-based practices. Thus, bridging the gap between the three titans, research, policy and practice (Commission of the European Communities, 2007; Biesta, 2007), as well as developing models of joint knowledge creation (Gibbons et al, 1994; McLaughlin, 2004) has prompted the attention of educational researchers. This paper examines a platform called HundrED, a project developed as part of celebrating a century of Finland. As part of a bigger framework organised by the government, HundrED gathers 100 opinions of educational experts, policy makers, principals and teachers, students and CEOs from Finland and elsewhere, along with 100 examples of innovative school practices, pedagogical approaches and extra-curricular activities. The culminating aspect, though, is the 100 experiments that will be implemented in Finnish schools under the auspices of this project, all with the aim of discovering what needs to change for the next 100 years of education. The main objective of the study was to explore the potential the project holds in terms of teacher self-directed professional development, as well as in terms of informing policy and correlating with the research. Teacher learning has been placed as the cornerstone of effective schooling and developing innovative practices (EDiTE, 2014), thus has been illustrated by Kwo (2010) as the teacher’s moral duty in the 21st century. While experimentation and collaborative reflection have shown accelerated trends in teacher learning (Bakkens et al, 2010), the complex field of continuous professional development, especially when self-motivated and self-directed, has multiple complexities and dimensions (Opfer and Pedder, 2011). Through content analysis and interviews the study shows how HundrED generates vast predispositions towards teacher learning as well as great potentials of alternative models of knowledge creation based on experimentation and mutual correspondence between practice, policy and research. Furthermore, the inherited practical aspect of HundrED informs of the successes and the bottlenecks in using digital means to reach better quality in education and benefit from the spectrum of evidence-based approaches. With its multiple features, this example opens up a possibility for an extensive inquiry and discussion.

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