In this study we examine the outcomes and products resulting from teachers’ day-to-day adjustments of their teaching and ask whether these can be understood as an essential aspect of teacher professional development (TPD).

Teacher professional development may be considered on a continuum ranging from highly explicit and organized to implicit and informal, including incidental and even “unconscious” elements (Evans, 2019). During the past two decades, teachers’ informal workplace learning has received increasing attention and is now widely acknowledged as an important and ubiquitous aspect of TPD (Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2005; Ingvarson, 2003; Kyndt et al., 2016).

In the literature, teachers’ day-to-day classroom experience and experimentation are recurring as sources of workplace learning. Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) included ”professional experimentation” as one of four components in their interconnected model of teacher professional growth. Moreover, they showed that this component was central in most sustained so-called “growth networks”, suggesting an extended cycle of enactment and reflection preceding any change in beliefs. Pedder (2007), using factor analysis, identified experimentation, reflection, and self-evaluation (Factor: “critical and responsive learning”) as one of four dimensions of teachers’ learning practices. Similarly, in a systematic review of research on teachers’ everyday professional development, Kyndt et al. (2016) found that most informal learning activities discussed in the literature were closely connected to classroom activity (p. 1122, Table 2). Taken together, the literature shows that teachers learn from their classroom practice through, for example, direct experience, trial and error, experimentation, and the implementation of materials and ideas from colleagues (cf. Kyndt et al., 2016).

To the extent that these continuous adjustments to practice have been analyzed, they have primarily been treated as processual factors—such as experimentation or trial and error—that influence teacher workplace learning. The actual changes in practice brought about through these processes have therefore largely been overlooked, as research has tended to prioritize learning as the main outcome of interest. This is the case even in studies that explicitly conceptualize TPD and professional learning as sustained inquiry into one’s own day-to-day practice (e.g., Ambler, 2016; Milton & Morgan, 2023; Salo et al., 2024). Yet it is entirely possible to imagine that an inquiry process may lead to outcomes whose value extends far beyond what the individuals conducting the inquiry learn—for example, within a research group. Indeed, in many contexts, the value of the results of an inquiry process is largely disconnected from individual or group learning as such. In this presentation, we argue that there may be significant gains in also paying attention to the concrete outcomes, or products, of teachers’ day-to-day inquiry into their practice. Our purpose is to explore whether teachers’ day-to-day adjustments of their practice result in interesting and potentially fruitful outcomes and products, and how these can be characterized. The research questions guiding the study are:

1. What different types of adjustments do teachers make in their classrooms?
2. Why do they make these adjustments?

Taken together, the answers to these questions provide an initial characterization of teachers’ day-to-day adjustments as constituting concrete outcomes (e.g., a new way of teaching about supply and demand) and products (e.g., a new scaffold for writing letters). As such, it constitutes a basis for discussing the potential significance of this type of continuous adjustments for teacher professional development and school development more broadly.

The study was conducted in a large city in Sweden. We contacted 7 schools by e-mail, either via the principal or another school contact, and asked about the possibility of conducting one or two focus group interviews on the theme “the adjustments teachers make as part of day-to-day teaching”. All schools responded positively. We conducted one focus group interview at five schools and two focus group interviews at each of the remaining two schools, yielding a total of nine interviews. The study followed Swedish Research Council (2024) ethical guidelines and data is handled in accordance with GDPR. The focus groups consisted of teachers working across Grades F–9 (with F referring to preschool class and 9 being the final year of compulsory schooling). The specific composition of the focus groups varied: five groups included teachers from the full grade range, two groups included teachers from Grades 7–9, one group from Grades 1–6, and one group from Grades 4–9. The interviews lasted between 70 and 90 minutes and followed an interview guide with three broad themes, in addition to the introduction and conclusion: (1) discussion of concrete adjustments made in teaching, (2) reflection on these adjustments, and (3) collegial collaboration. In this paper, we primarily report on data related to the first two themes. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed using Amberscript (2025), after which the transcripts were checked and corrected by listening to the recordings. The transcribed interviews were analyzed using a combination of elements from thematic analysis and grounded theory (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2021; Glaser & Strauss, 2006 [1967]) through several iterative steps. We began by independently coding one interview each. The initial coding was then discussed and refined to reach consensus on code definitions. The remaining interviews were subsequently divided between us and coded separately, resulting both in confirmations of existing codes and in the development of new or modified ones. These codes were again discussed and revised to reach final consensus. All codes and their instances were then entered into Excel for purposes of quantification and for adding qualitative comments. Based on this material, categories were jointly developed and iteratively validated by testing them against the original transcripts, with particular attention to overlaps and negative cases that could potentially challenge individual categories (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Throughout the analytic process, emerging codes and categories were continuously related back to the two research questions.

Our findings confirm that changes in practice occur regularly and across contexts, but that teachers do not tend to view these changes as potential contributions to professional practice; rather, they see them as simply part of everyday teaching. The changes identified fell into two main categories. Context-bound adjustments (CBAs) are adjustments that are specific to “here-and-now” situations, such as a teacher rearranging which students sit together, and that cannot easily be transferred to another context or used by another teacher. Although clearly part of teachers’ professional repertoires, adjustments coded as CBAs were not further categorized. Generalizable adjustments (GAs), by contrast, are adjustments that could be used by another teacher in another school to address the same type of dilemma that the adjustment was intended to handle. GAs often emerged from reflective and experimental processes in which teachers noticed and acted upon aspects of their students’ cognitive, practical, or social performance. In this sense, GAs can be understood as modifications that teachers have scrutinized and assessed as functional. Six categories of GAs were identified based on their content, with most adjustments falling into the category “Teaching approaches”. In addition, five categories were identified concerning the motives or reasons teachers gave for making the adjustment in the first place. The most common reason was to promote improved learning of subject matter (e.g., learning about supply and demand or learning how to write a letter). A potentially significant finding is that most GAs can be understood as contributing to teaching quality, with some even constituting potential innovations of teaching practice. In the presentation, we discuss the implications of this low intensity development work of teachers for current research and policy on teacher professional development and school development.

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