Samenvatting

Three schoolboards of primary education in a new town in the Netherlands were confronted with disappointing student results over a longer period of time. They joined forces and asked the local government and an associative
professor at a university of applied sciences (the author of this article) for
help. These five parties came to the understanding that in order to enhance student results they needed to empower schools. They wished to focus on the continuous professional development of both teachers and school leaders. They were seeking a coherent or aligned way to activate this. How could they work on developing the correct efforts on each organizational level (the classroom, the school and the organization as a whole)? By what means could they enhance capacity development on all levels and allow these levels to interact and contribute to mutual development? The answers to these
questions resulted in a model, which was named The Learning Turbine. In
this article the author presents The Learning Turbine and some of the
lessons learned whilst working with The Learning Turbine in nine schools.