Keywords

FormalPara Key Message

The theoretical framework and empirical examples presented in this chapter stem from school improvement research and can be used by schools that want to work practically according to a whole school approach (WSA) toward education for sustainable development (ESD) through policymakers who want to establish guidelines enabling the implementation of WSA to ESD and through researchers who want to investigate and analyze the process of institutionalizing WSA to ESD.

1 Introduction

The concept of whole school approach (WSA) has become a central terminology used in the policy on sustainability education or education for sustainable development (ESD).Footnote 1 The reason for this is that regular education within the boundaries of school subjects has been urged to address the need to educate citizens who can meet the sustainability challenges of the twenty-first century (see, e.g., Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2015). According to Wals and Mathie (2022), schools are challenged by the problem of how to respond to emerging societal issues such as runaway climate change. So far, more education has not reversed the negative decline of the environment. Consequently, a WSA to ESD has been suggested to redirect education toward a more sustainable society (Henderson & Tilbury, 2004; Mogren, 2019). Since learning cognitively and decontextualized about sustainability issues and how to solve them has proven not to translate into changed values and actions toward sustainability outside school, learning in authentic settings is suggested to stimulate students’ affective dimensions of emotions, attitudes, and values (Eilam & Trop, 2010). Consequently, affective dimensions are often given equal importance as the cognitive knowledge dimension in ESD (Gericke & Torbjörnsson, 2022b). Therefore, the WSA has been suggested as the next step in sustainability education because it imposes an inclusive perspective on teaching and learning, including all stakeholders in the school, and opens education to the society outside the school.

There is rich diversity in the ways the WSA has been described in the literature. However, a common guiding principle for the WSA is the integration of three lines of action: environmental management (“greening”) of the school, the establishment of ongoing partnerships with the broader local community to address issues of social-environmental sustainability, and incorporation of sustainability in the curriculum (Gericke, 2022). Hence, a WSA demands the efforts of the whole school community and external stakeholders to expose students to real sustainability issues. Research has, however, continuously shown that this is a very difficult goal to achieve (Holst, 2023; Laurie et al., 2016; Mathar, 2015; Mogren & Gericke 2017a, b; Müller et al., 2021). Therefore, the most central issue as we see it in practice and research on the WSA is how to implement the approach or, to put it differently, how to reform a school to work according to a WSA.

WSA to ESD has mainly been practice-based and lacked a foundation in educational theory on how a school works as an organization. Our research group has been inspired by and has applied methods and theories from the field of school improvement research to study the WSA toward sustainability. In this chapter, we build on those experiences and take a novel process perspective from developed theories within school improvement research to suggest how a WSA to ESD can be implemented in schools over time. The theory and its implications are also accompanied and compared with empirical findings from our studies to further elaborate on practical implications for local school reforms on a WSA to ESD. The school improvement processes, its drivers and constraints toward ESD, are discussed longitudinally based on school improvement theories mainly resting on the works of Blossing et al. (2015) and Fullan (2007). Hence, the focus of this chapter will be to propose and critically discuss the school improvement processes leading to a WSA.

2 What Is a Whole School Approach?

A WSA to ESD can be defined as the involvement of a whole school community in efforts to promote sustainable development, in addition to the orientation of the teaching, learning, and curriculum toward its promotion (Henderson & Tilbury, 2004; McKeown & Hopkins, 2007). The concept of WSA was originally used in research about schools’ ability to incorporate perspectives of health, well-being, and anti-bullying (Rowe & Stewart, 2009; Wyn et al., 2000). The goal has been to engage all departments of a school in common efforts at all levels to improve targeted characteristics, for example, the well-being of staff and pupils. The WSA approach has been suggested as a method to draw on the experiences of external stakeholders and use their expertise on urgent matters for society. External stakeholders can then support education toward societal solutions within certain areas of interest (Wyn et al., 2000). Students have in this way been engaged in relevant development tasks in the wider society while still in school. This has been found to be a successful approach in health education, according to a few studies (see Rowe & Stewart, 2009). The WSA has subsequently been adopted and proposed for use in ESD and sustainability education and is established especially in Australia and New Zealand (see, e.g., Eames et al., 2010; Henderson & Tilbury, 2004). In summary, WSA was originally developed to create shorter links and more extensive cooperation between educational institutions and local societies, attempting to create opportunities to learn from each other and affect each other’s agendas.

However, regardless of whether WSA has been suggested or applied in health education or sustainability education, there are very few empirical studies on how to accomplish this and even fewer studies using WSA as a theoretical lens. In a recent chapter on implementing ESD using a WSA, Gericke (2022) gives an historical overview of the literature on WSA relating to ESD for the interested reader to learn more about previous developments of WSA. What stands out in that review is that several models for working according to WSA for ESD have been proposed (see Henderson & Tilbury, 2004; Mathar, 2015; Mogren et al., 2019; Shallcross & Robinson, 2008), and recently the “flower model” by Wals and Mathie (2022) was added to the list. Common to these models is that they point out the many complex features or key components within the school organization that should be addressed to establish connections to the wider community in teaching and learning. For example, Shallcross and Robinson (2008) identify formal curricula, social and organizational aspects, institutional practice, and research and evaluation as crucial to establishing community links, while Wals and Mathie (2022) recognize pedagogy and learning, institutional practice, capacity building, curriculum and visionary leadership, and coordination as crucial components. Based on this conformity in the literature, our conclusion is that to establish a WSA to ESD in a school, there needs to be a reciprocal process, simultaneously reforming and renewing the way the school is working in alignment with the organizational mechanisms in the local school organization.

In traditional educational reforms, school developers are often asked to work in alignment with the schools’ existing organization and culture (Cohen & Mehta, 2017), while the ESD discourse has proposed more radical suggestions to reform schools according to the WSA. For example, Sterling (2004) suggests a “whole system redesign,” and Lotz-Sisitka et al. (2015 p73) argue that “to break with maladaptive resilience of unsustainable systems it is essential to strengthen transgressive learning and disruptive capacity-building.” Due to the urgency of the sustainability issues in nature and society as we are transgressing our planetary boundaries (Steffen et al., 2015), there are of course powerful incentives to radically change and reform schools. However, we would argue that this is difficult to achieve at the local school level because schools in many countries are under the jurisdiction of national law and other regulatory documents that are only possible to influence at a higher political level than the local school organization. This situation is supported by research and practice showing that redirecting schools to the WSA for sustainability is difficult as there are few good examples (Laurie et al., 2016; Müller et al., 2021). In our research group, we have therefore worked according to a more conservative line of action and collaborated with local school organizations to support the reform within the existing educational systems. In so doing, we have looked at and taken inspiration from existing educational sciences with the specific aim of contributing to local school reforms, that is, school improvement research. We argue that much of what has been learnt in school improvement research is also valid in sustainability education and is fundamental when addressing how WSA for ESD is to be established. In the next section, we elaborate on our previous empirical research before going into a more explicit suggestion on how sustainability education can be implemented through a WSA.

3 Aligning Inner School Organization with Authentic Sustainability Problems

What then do we empirically know about implementing WSA from a school improvement perspective? In previous and ongoing research within our research group, we have shown that the internal organizational structures of the school (Mogren et al., 2019) and the contextual factors influencing the school (Gericke & Torbjörnsson, 2022a, b) need to be considered in the local reform agenda to accomplish a WSA to ESD.

Mogren (2019) introduced a way to contribute to this gap by linking school improvement research to ESD research. The link between the two provides a way to understand how a WSA to ESD is established based on school improvement research tools and theories, where theoretical models from the field of school improvement embracing the whole school system can be used to investigate education and contribute further understanding of the anchoring process of ESD in school organizations. In Mogren’s (2019) overall thesis project, school leaders and teachers from ten of the most recognized ESD schools at the upper secondary level in Sweden, supposedly working according a WSA, participated in a combined interview and questionnaire study. The aim of the project was to contribute new knowledge on ways that school organizations can implement ESD while aligning with a WSA. In this overall project, the school leaders were interviewed and asked to identify the quality criteria for implementing ESD (Mogren & Gericke, 2017a). Clustering the schools’ practices according to ESD implementation strategies, based on these criteria, resulted in four main principles for ESD implementation according to WSA: collaborative interaction and school development, student-centered education, cooperation with local society, and proactive leadership and continuity (Mogren & Gericke, 2017b). Moreover, the results showed that the schools focused either on the internal part of the organization, that is, the dimension of routines and structures, or on the external community links, that is, professional knowledge creation. A conclusion from these studies was that a main problem in implementing WSA for the participating schools was to align the internal organizational aspects with an educational approach emphasizing authentic ESD learning by using community links.

The finding that schools trying to implement ESD and work according to a WSA had difficulties in aligning the school organization with the wider society is very problematic, as the literature claims that this is the most important goal of a WSA to ESD (Henderson & Tilbury, 2004; Shallcross & Robinson, 2008; Wals & Mathie, 2022). One reason for this problem could be that the WSA–ESD relationship looks different in the case of sustainability education compared with more conventional topics often addressed in local school reforms, such as increasing interest in science or improving learning outcomes in mathematics (Gericke & Torbjörnsson, 2022a). In the latter cases, what is to be achieved is static, that is, change in attitudes or change in learning outcomes. In ESD, however, the goal is much more complex and fluid, for example, to provide students with an action competence to deal with complex sustainability problems (Olsson et al., 2020). In such problems, issues of economy, society, and environment are entangled, and students are supposed to learn how to decide and act using various kinds of authentic knowledge and values depending on the problem at hand (Berglund & Gericke, 2018, 2022). Hence, it is problematic when schools often run the same ESD themes every year in the whole school without assessing their relevance to students and current society demands and, therefore, miss out on the relevance of education to the outer society, as well as making sustainability education relevant to the students (Henderson & Tilbury, 2004). In the schools we studied, staff and students often collaborated on ESD without connecting to society, and they were often top-down steered by the school leader. Therefore, ESD was superficial and not implemented in the schools’ regular educational program (Mogren & Gericke, 2019). To conclude, the issue of aligning the school organization with the outer society seems to be crucial to schools wanting to work according to WSA.

Returning to the ten investigated WSA to ESD active schools, we found that the school leaders’ responses in nine schools could easily be linked to an internally or externally oriented way of applying ESD in their school organizations (Mogren & Gericke, 2017b). Only one school managed to combine the two strategies by integrating a focus on student-centered education with cooperation with local society. In this school, connections with organizations and stakeholders in the society were a responsibility for the students themselves in their education. A major aspect of this school’s historical development to practice a WSA to ESD revealed by the study was that it had undergone something of a transition from proactive leadership established by its previous school leader toward a more student-centered education-oriented style of leadership by the current school leader (Mogren & Gericke, 2017b). Hence, the importance of school leadership to work locally with a WSA to ESD cannot be overemphasized (Mogren & Gericke, 2019).

Interestingly, these studies at the school leader level were later confirmed by a survey study with the teachers at the same schools. In the teacher study (Mogren et al., 2019), a survey instrument was used covering a model of four theoretical dimensions of the school organization: (1) whether the school had an articulated common holistic vision of their aims concerning student outcomes, and the pedagogic methods and perspectives that should be applied to realize the vision (the holistic idea dimension); (2) how the school upheld the inner school organization (the routines and structures dimension); (3) how the school accommodated the organization in relation to changes in the local community (the professional knowledge creation dimension); and (4) how the teachers and students should create learning platforms together, handling situations in the learning interaction in a manner promoting both the students’ learning of new knowledge and the teachers’ teaching ability (the teaching and learning dimension). The teacher study confirmed that the schools in which the staff managed to integrate and align the inner school organization and culture with the needs of the outer society, according to the teachers, also increased the quality of teaching and learning in their schools (Mogren et al., 2019). The studies above, based on school improvement research, are good empirical examples of the need to align the inner school organization with the outer society, which therefore seems to be crucial for schools working according to a WSA to ESD.

The findings in our previous studies are also in line with the findings of Leo and Wickenberg (2013) in their case studies on ESD-active schools. Recently, Verhelst et al. (2020, 2023) made a review on educational management in relation to ESD. Based on that review, they developed a conceptual framework for an ESD-effective school organization in terms of what organizational characteristics are of importance to implement ESD effectively within the school organization (Verhelst et al., 2020, 2023). Although this framework does not address WSA to ESD, it still identifies supportive relations to outer society as an important aspect of an ESD-effective school organization, which further strengthens the argument that ESD needs to be related to outer society when addressed from a WSA perspective. Studies of ESD school organizations and WSA models give theoretical and empirical evidence for involving the whole school in relation to its surrounding community, but they say little about how to accomplish this in practice. The studies discussed in this and previous sections give no practical insights into how to implement WSA to ESD while aligning it with the development process of the local school organization. What we know is that this process takes time and have many hurdles to overcome, as observed by Müller et al. (2021 p12) in their review of the field: “Introducing ESD in schools is a marathon, not a sprint.” In the next section, we outline this long process, and show how empirically derived theories in school improvement research, mainly based on the work of Blossing et al. (2015) and Fullan (2007), can describe how this process can be achieved over time, and what pitfalls to look out for during the process.

4 Capacity Building as a Tool to Conceptualize Implementation of WSA to ESD

Previous research in the field of ESD lacks theoretical and practical tools on how to steer and implement a WSA in local school organizations. To find such tools, we turned to the field of school improvement. From a school improvement perspective, the concept of capacity building is often used. A useful metaphor for capacity building in schools—as societal institutions—is different forms of social capital (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). Capital in social and educational contexts refers to a quality or an asset that can be exchanged for any desirable educational condition or a desired change in the school. In the case of ESD or sustainability education research, we translate this into the implementation of ESD as a teaching approach and, as a consequence of this, the development of students’ action competence (Gericke & Torbjörnsson, 2022b). We are thus interested in develo** the capacity of local school organizations to reform their way of working in line with WSA to ESD.

School improvement refers to school-wide improvement processes that include the whole school organization and is “a distinct approach to educational change that aims to enhance students’ learning outcomes as well as strengthening the school’s capacity for managing change” (Hopkins, 2001 p 139). Knowledge about school improvement and institutionalization processes has accumulated since the middle of the twentieth century (see Miles et al., 1987), and today there is strong empirical evidence that even when schools are motivated to improve, many struggle to implement change or fail to sustain it (Forssten Seiser & Blossing, 2020).

School organizations are complex and dynamic, and even more so when WSA and ESD are involved, as argued above. Therefore, school improvement efforts cannot be assumed as an activity in a linear chain of causes and effects; rather, it needs to be comprehended in a larger context (Blossing et al., 2015). Hence, it is important to take a broad view of the school as an organization and acknowledge that to “succeed” (make a change), one must grasp the complexity of various factors that influence a school’s capacity to improve. It is about making the complex a little less complicated and to reach a deeper understanding. Researchers such as Harris (2001) and Hopkins (2001) argue that a school’s improvement capacity is crucial when it comes to achieving school improvement. Develo** schools’ self-renewing ability requires commitment, skills, and knowledge of both school leaders and the teachers. Not seldom, it also includes other professional functions in the educational system as both internal and external parts of the system shape and are shaped by each other. In this chapter, we use the four themes identified by Blossing et al. (2015) for develo** or enhancing a school’s capacity to improve:

  • Improvement history of the school

  • Infrastructure of the school organization

  • Improvement processes

  • Improvement roles

To understand these four themes, we address each of them in turn. Theoretically, they are possible to separate, but in practice they are intertwined. Starting with the first theme improvement history, every organization has a distinct history, meaning that over time organizations develop rules and routines that are relatively stable and persistent and not seldom developed into norms and social systems in the form of institutions, in this case as schools (Giddens, 1984). Consequently, activities and ideas are often no longer questioned or debated in the institution; instead, they become more or less taken for granted. Therefore, we need historical information that can help us understand why previous improvement efforts have succeeded or failed. Consequently, it is important to keep a school’s improvement history alive as this provides an awareness of what actions have been enabling and constraining in former school development efforts. This kind of knowledge is important in planning and designing improvement efforts so that supportive action can be enhanced and constraining actions may be avoided or changed. In our projects with schools to implement WSA to ESD, we encountered this problem in practice. In an implementation study over 3 years, the WSA to ESD was more difficult to establish in schools with bad experiences of previous improvement projects, which is why the same design criteria and process for implementing WSA can turn out differently in schools depending on their improvement history (Gericke & Torbjörnsson, 2022a). This shows that a school’s historical experiences influence how much capacity for school improvement a particular school has accumulated and has in store for the school reform at hand.

The second theme in a school’s capacity to improve is the infrastructure. This pays attention to the whole picture of the school as the infrastructure of the school organization captures the daily social life of students, teachers, and principals concerning rules and routines as well as more cultural and unconscious aspects. The infrastructure is built on a foundation of eight specific systems that can be used for analyzing schools’ social life that together constitutes the infrastructure model: the grou** system, the communication system, the goal management system, the power and responsibility system, the decision-making system, the norm system, the reward system, and the evaluation system (Blossing et al., 2015). Exploring these systems renders knowledge about how teachers and students are grouped in the school, how (or if) certain goals are discussed and managed, how the power to make decisions as well as responsibility to execute them is distributed, how teachers perceive and signal “good teaching,” what behavior is rewarded or punished, and how information about the quality in the organization is evaluated. This kind of information forms an infrastructure in which the social life in a local school is performed. Moreover, it plays a significant role within school development, which then can be used as a tool in planning and leading the school improvement process. Fullan (2007) stresses the need for an infrastructure that supports the implementation of change as it is necessary that it nurtures and supports ongoing efforts, not least in terms of time enhancing collective learning and collaboration. For example, the frequency of meetings and work in teacher teams is crucial for school improvement success (Smooch & Drach-Zahvy, 2007), which signals that a lack of meetings will become a big obstacle if this is not provided within the school’s infrastructure.

The third theme, improvement processes, focuses on different phases in a school improvement process. The first subprocess is called initiation (Blossing et al., 2015). This is the stage when new ideas are proposed, commitment is sought, and the local school organization hopefully begins to change. Initiation activities are more typical at the beginning but must also occur throughout the entire process. The next subprocess is implementation. This stage involves putting new ideas into practice. This is the subprocess that is likely to require the most efforts as it is at this point that everyone is supposed to adapt to the new idea (the reform—such as a WSA to ESD), which also includes new ways of acting (teaching) (Fullan, 2007). The last subprocess is institutionalization, which involves incorporating the “new” idea into the school’s internal infrastructure so the “new idea” no longer is new. The three subprocesses mentioned are closely related to each other and often overlap**. But it is theoretically and practically important to distinguish the specific features of each subprocess.

The improvement processes are closely linked to the school’s improvement history as the latter may show that a particular school has developed a talent for performing a rigorous initiation phase, introducing new ideas for the teachers. But the history may also reveal that the initiation phase was perceived as “the whole improvement process” resulting in an improvement process that slowly stopped and finally vanished because the process was seen as completed already after a semester. A whole school improvement process often lasts from 5 to 8 years before it can be assessed as institutionalized (Blossing et al., 2015).

To prevent the school improvement process to cease in the intensive and demanding implementation phase, the use of improvement roles is recommended (Blossing et al., 2015). This is the fourth and last theme of school improvement capacity and deals with the roles it can take on in a school improvement work and how these roles vary in importance during the whole process. The different roles are to be understood as extended leadership for change. A successful initiation is often lead by skilled visionaries, who serve a central function of communicating the “new” and of creating a fundamental understanding among the staff. Midthassel and Bru (2001) found that the degree of relevance attributed by the teachers was the main motivating factor to their involvement. This emphasizes how important it is for participants to perceive the improvement work as relevant. To survive the implementation phase, when concrete action is required and defense mechanisms arise, it is necessary to have inventors. Inventors are teachers who communicate how to put “the new” into practice. In our previous studies on locally implementing WSA via professional development efforts, we found that it is necessary to continuously negotiate a shared vision and build trust around the WSA during both initiation and implementation phases with the teachers to make the reform survive (Gericke & Torbjörnsson, 2022b). Listening to the inventors are the early appliers. These are brave teachers who go ahead and try out the inventors’ innovations. There will also be a need for drivers especially in the implementation phase. The drivers’ role is to speed up the practical work when some teachers are ignoring the improvement efforts and just want to be left alone so they can keep doing what they have been long doing. The goal keepers remind people of the aim of the new and the inspectors gather information and propose action to keep the improvement process going on the right track. Finally, the preservers play an important role in reminding what already works and making sure that these things do not vanish among the new idea. These roles should not be perceived as personal qualities but as professional roles or functions, and it is important that they are all represented in a school development process.

In this section, we have addressed the four themes identified by Blossing et al. (2015) for develo** or enhancing a school’s capacity to improve in an intended direction. Hence, by considering the themes and their underlying systems, subprocesses, and roles that are described in this section, it is possible to develop a local school reform program with the aim of establishing a WSA to ESD. In the following section, we take a chronological perspective and describe how an improvement process can develop over time. The time factor is of outmost importance when aiming for a WSA to ESD (Müller et al., 2021).

5 A School Improvement Process Leading to Establishing WSA to ESD

Each school improvement process has its own history, starting with its initiation and, in successful cases, ending with its institutionalization. As described above, institutionalization is a process of building in structures that facilitate educational changes in a lasting way so they can continue as stable routines of a local school’s daily life. When the “new” (in this case WSA to ESD) is accepted by the users as something normal, it is incorporated into the local school organization (infrastructure) as a natural pattern or structure. This process is complex and dynamic, and the question of how institutionalization happens is not simple. Therefore, we cannot be prescriptive, but we provide a description from a theoretical perspective of how changes in school organizations can become stabilized and lasting in practice.

Based on the empirical results from our 3-year-long WSA to ESD project (Boeve-de Pauw et al., 2022; Forssten Seiser et al., 2023; Gericke & Torbjörnsson 2022a, b), we have included some recommendations in the descriptions of how we worked to drive a WSA for ESD process forward during the school improvement phases. We outline the recommendations under the respective school improvement phase. We would also like to emphasize that these phases do not follow each other in a straight line but rather overlap with each other. Included in each stage are some examples of the function of different improvement roles. We also demonstrate how the school infrastructure can be used as a tool for leading the improvement process. Finally, a well-known and well-documented school improvement history is understood as an absolute prerequisite in planning, designing, and leading the process.

5.1 Initiation

In terms of time, activities in the initiation phase can last from 0.5 to 1 year, depending on the context (Blossing et al., 2015). The aim in this phase is to create curiosity, interest, and knowledge of the WSA to ESD. A way of doing this can be to arrange specific WSA to ESD conferences where the whole staff is invited. Another is to engage experts giving lectures on WSA and ESD. Arranging study visits to ESD-effective schools and organizing workshops around the subject are other suitable activities in this initiation phase. This will require a coherent infrastructure that enables and nurtures these kinds of activities. A supportive norm system in the form of a positive language is crucial as well as a decision-making system providing resources for activities to create interest and engagement in WSA to ESD, and so on.

In the initiation phase, the role of the visionary is essential. A school leader may take on this role but also an engaged teacher, or even better both. If the school improvement capacity is low, and perhaps also the general knowledge of WSA to ESD, a suitable strategy could be to engage an external agent in form of an “ESD expert” for creating engagement and develo** a deeper understanding. However, this strategy implies that the external change agent will be slowly removed during the improvement process and that this function should consciously be handed over to the teachers and the school leaders.

At this stage of the process, there will be progressive teachers who very soon want to try to put ESD into practice. It is of great importance to identify these teachers who then can function as inventors and early appliers. It is important that bottom-up initiatives are encouraged and supported as these teachers are likely to become the school’s internal ESD experts and facilitators during the ensuing process. An important strategy in the initiation process is to connect these efforts to the school infrastructure and more specifically to the reward system. It is important to facilitate communication between the participants in the WSA to create and negotiate a common vision for the WSA to ESD. All activities that promote engagement, participation, and the development of shared responsibility are advantageous as the next phase in the process is critical and often conflict filled.

5.2 Implementation

In this second phase of the WSA to ESD process, the initial learning is meant to be transformed into practical work. This phase is most critical as it often means conducting teaching differently within new organizational settings (infrastructure), also connected to stakeholders in the wider society. This phase needs persistence, as research has shown that the implementation phase can last up to 7 years (Blossing et al., 2015).

In this phase, it is no longer enough that only progressive teachers have an ESD approach in their teaching as the aim is that every teacher should start to work in line with this approach. This explains why the implementation phase is often conflict-filled, as some teachers are not yet prepared to change how they teach. This means that there could be a resistance toward ESD, and working collegially and in cross-curricular themes might seem threatening to some of the teachers. Often, it is at this point that the progression starts to shift back and forth, and a united and committed ESD leadership is a prerequisite for continued progression. In our empirical studies, we found that ESD implementation does not follow a linear development but evolves in waves over time as resistance is overcome (Boeve-de Pauw et al., 2022). This is the time for the drivers to step forward. Teachers and school leaders acting as drives are necessary when defense mechanisms begin to develop. The driver’s function is to ensure that everyone is capable of working according to ESD and encouraging skeptical teachers to start (or at least try) to work according to the WSA to ESD. The goal keepers are the ones reminding everyone of the schools shared vision of WSA to ESD. The function of the drivers is an example of how to enhance the goal system within the school’s infrastructure. From a leading perspective, it is important to stick to the goals and to implement what was learned in the initiating phase. This involves, for example, reorganizing the school grou** system by organizing teachers in cross-curricular teams. Cooperative activities need to be promoted, and regular professional development in the form of seminars, conferences, and similar activities must continue. The aim is to also develop a collaborative culture and to challenge individual norm systems.

Being a school leader or teacher with the role as a facilitator in a local school reform toward WSA to ESD is an exposed position, as it often means challenging colleagues. This means that school resources are needed for assigning several facilitators so they as a community can handle the situations and critique that might arise. The development of an ESD facilitator group meeting regularly and providing guidance to each other on how to act is a wise strategy. A sign to heed in this phase is that teachers might start to argue within the school’s norm system that “ESD is not anything new as this is the way they have always worked.” This could be an indication that ESD is turning into “window dressing,” meaning that things that may seem like ESD (such as decorating walls with SDGs) are not necessarily the same as conducting a WSA to ESD. Therefore, it is important that the facilitators and the school leaders meet regularly for reflection and analysis. We endorse school leaders to be operative and engaged in the actual work that takes place in the local school reform. A democratic decision-making system is also a wise strategy for establishing trustful relations, as this ensures that individuals know that they can influence the reform at hand.

5.3 Institutionalization

If the teachers and school leaders overcome the resistance in the implementation phase and work persistently according to a WSA to ESD for 3–7 years, the improvement process is likely to move into the institutionalization phase (Blossing et al., 2015). ESD as a WSA is assessed as institutionalized when it becomes a norm and routine in the daily work of the school. In other words, ESD is now included in the school’s infrastructure and has developed into routines described as “how we do things around here.” This is when the school more or less works in a way that is prescribed by the different WSA to ESD models for sustainability education (Mogren et al., 2019; Shallcross & Robinson, 2008; Wals & Mathie, 2022).

From a school leading perspective, there is no time to relax even if WSA to ESD has reached the institutionalization phase, as local schools are constantly exposed to external demands. Leading activities promoting regular professional development, collegial collaboration, and cross-curricular activities still need to be in focus—as new projects are always a competitive factor—and exert external pressure on capacity building to work in line with WSA to ESD (Gericke & Torbjörnsson, 2022a). Teachers’ voluntariness to participate or not in a school improvement effort such as WSA to ESD is often justified, although not clearly expressed, by professional arguments. In many countries, it is often part of teachers’ professional skills to determine how to teach and what content to focus, and to decide whether they consider it worthwhile to participate (Eilam & Trop, 2010). In cases where participation is mandatory, the engagement is often low, and there is a lack of shared responsibility. School improvement research shows how both voluntary and mandatory participation can promote or hinder school improvement. Blossing and Ertesvåg (2011) recommend that the voluntary nature be included later in the school improvement process to give the teachers the opportunity first to experience the process and current content before deciding to participate or not.

6 Concluding Remarks

We have in this chapter discussed that to achieve success in a WSA to ESD, schools need the capacity to improve and a shared leadership with the ability to integrate the present and the past while kee** a focus on the future. To conclude, we have shown a way to institutionalize WSA to ESD in school organizations based on school improvement theories. Institutionalization is here seen as a process of establishing organizational structures that facilitate educational changes in a lasting way so they can continue as stable routines of a local school’s daily life, subsequent to having participated in a local school reform (Forssten Seiser et al., 2023). We would argue that a local school reform aiming to implement WSA to ESD has a greater possibility to succeed if it attends to the recommendations given in this chapter on how to build the capacity to improve and follows these empirically identified capacity-building guidelines. However, it is important to recognize that a time perspective as long as 5–8 years may be needed to institutionalize WSA to ESD at a local school, which is a time span that is longer than usually suggested in the ESD literature (Müller et al., 2021).

In this chapter, we have not addressed the importance of having a well-functioning evaluation system providing important information about the quality of the work that is conducted and about the social life in a local school (Fullan, 2007). Therefore, we would like to conclude by pointing out that it is important to monitor the implementation process over time to be able to adjust the process and thereby hopefully ending with a WSA to ESD aiming to empower students’ action competence for sustainability, as first intended. To fully monitor the implementation efforts and understand the underlying school improvement processes, it is recommended to gather data from the school leader, teacher, and student levels (Desimone, 2009). In addition, we would recommend monitoring how school organizational aspects are related to teaching practices and student learning outcomes to fully comprehend the WSA to ESD implementation process. Furthermore, data should be collected longitudinally during the implementation process (Boeve-de Pauw et al., 2022) and preferably used in a stimulated recall design in the continuing negotiating process with the stakeholders of the schools (Gericke & Torbjörnsson, 2022b). These basic ideas have been used in efforts to evaluate attempts to institutionalize WSA to ESD (see Boeve-de Pauw et al., 2022; Forssten Seiser et al., 2023; Gericke & Torbjörnsson 2022a, b; Olsson et al., 2022). Much more could be said about these issues, but that is a story for another chapter.