This presentation is based on a school development project (2006-2009) where seven researchers cooperated with the teachers and the school administration in one single school for two years in order to develop the school into a learning organisation. The school is a Norwegian comprehensive elementary urban school for grades 1-10, with 40 teachers and 500 students. The project consisted of five cooperating subprojects (Steen-Olsen & Postholm, 2009) funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The overall aim was to generate collective learning strategies for the teachers in order to strengthen the pupils’ learning. The teachers were divided into three teaching teams, representing respectively students in grade 1-4, 5-7 and 8 -10. The research topic in this presentation is to shed light on the teachers’ experiences of the development work two years after the development period is ended, framed by the research question: “Development of collective learning practices – on what conditions does it succeed, and does it survive after the researchers have left the school?” The aim is to analyse how development work is maintained at the school when the project period is over, and how teachers experience the learning outcome of development work. During the development work period the teachers used planned strategies like colleague observations and systematic sharing of experiences, reflections and knowledge to enhance collective learning. Drawing upon know-how that collective ambitions to develop organisations from the inside earlier have given good results, this project was based on a bottom-up design (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Krogh, Ichijo & Nonaka, 2000; Senge, 2006).  It was set out from the start that the teachers should have a high level of autonomyand therefore they decided themselves which fields they wanted to develop together with the outside researchers in the three teaching teams. By deliberately reinforcing the teachers’ sense of ownership of the project on of the initial aims was to generate sustainable practices which would endure after the researchers had left the field. Discussion of the research question includes analysis of (i) structural factors (authority/priority/resources) and (ii) individual factors (social practice/strategies/agency). In the theory of structuration, Giddens (1984) regards social practice as a set of rules and resources constructed in the meeting between individuals and structural properties. Strategic action/agency is to make use of available rules and resources to overcome structural hindrances, and thus influencing the possibility to act autonomously. Even though the teachers in our project were positive to join, they constantly seemed to be under pressure due to time constraints (Steen-Olsen & Eikseth, 2010). In order to reduce structural obstacles and to facilitate agency, the school administration had given the teachers some extra time resources per week for participating in the development work. Data will be discussed by contextualizing development work in relation to ideas of school development, central educational reform ideas and local implementation (Creemers, Stoll & Reezigt, 2007; Bogotch, Mirón & Biesta, 2007; Townsend, 2007). In this landscape the teachers’ strategies will be studied in the light of agency and discursive practices (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999).

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