How to achieve school reform and organisational change has been a subject of much inquiry and interest by educators, education systems and academics. This volume advances both conceptual and methodological knowledge in understanding the cultural changes required at the school level to develop teachers' collective responsibility for student learning. The concept of teachers' collective responsibility is both intriguing and elusive as it traverses both sociological and psychological aspects of teaching. Five major but interconnected discourses: professional community; professional development; relational trust; accountability; and efficacy map the terrain of this complex phenomenon. Results reported in this volume provide clear evidence that collective responsibility is positively correlated the coherence between professional learning programs and the school's learning goals, teachers' commitment to enact those shared goals and teacher-to-teacher trust. In addition, teachers' collective struggle to address pressing issues for teaching and learning, and pedagogical leadership, when embedded in the organisational capacity of a school, form a complex and dynamic set of factors influencing the development of collective responsibility. Drawing together these important findings surfaces a need to rethink how schools, education systems and academics pay attention to what falls between the cracks for school reform. This book addresses aspects of school culture that guide the choices in the development of teachers' collective responsibility. Professional development, collective struggle, professional community, relational trust and pedagogical leadership as elements of school culture and organisational reform are modelled as a continuum of micro-political conditions interacting at the school level. This model offers new insights into the complexity of collective responsibility as a multi-dimensional phenomenon and is a useful guide to organisational change for school and system leaders and academics whose research interests are focused on the how of organisational change.

Education is an essential pathway to bridging the divide in educational attainment between Indigenous and non- Indigenous students. In the Australian policy contexts, Indigenous Education has been informed by a large number of reviews, reports and an extensive list of projects aimed at improving educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Central to each has been the investigation of the inequity of access to educational resources, the legacy of historical policies of exclusion and the lack of culturally responsive pedagogical practices that impact on Indigenous student achievement at school. Research on best practice models for teaching Indigenous students points to the level of teachers' commitment being a crucial link to student engagement in the classroom, improvement of student self concept and student retention rates. Most recently, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) has recognised in the National Professional Standards for Teachers, that practising teachers must attain skills in working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their communities. Clearly it is time for new pedagogical practices in Indigenous education that are implemented in partnerships with local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This book reports on a three-year research based study of action learning in schools that sought to enhance engagement with local Aboriginal communities, promote quality teaching and improve students' learning outcomes. The school studies come from different demographic regions in New South Wales, Australia's most populous state and showcase the achievements and challenges; highs and lows; affordances and obstacles in the development and delivery of innovative curriculum strategies for teaching Aboriginal histories and cultures in Australian schools. The findings illustrate that engaging teachers in a learning journey in collaboration with academic partners and members of local Aboriginal communities in an action learning process, can deliver innovative teaching programs over a sustained period of time. As a result schools demonstrated that these approaches do produce positive educational outcomes for teachers and students and enable authentic partnerships with Aboriginal communities.