The RESPOND project framework envisages four intersecting focuses designed to produce tools for facilitating the sustainability of teacher professional development. The RESPOND Teacher Professional Profile for Global Competence and Portfolio defines a common teacher professional profile related to global competence articulated in specific areas and types, levels, and indicators of competence. The RESPOND Teacher Professional Development Support Guide-lines is designed to promote the roles of and interactions between different actors in school, with particular reference to mentors, newly qualified teachers, experienced teachers, and school leaders. The RESPOND School Development as a Professional Learning Environment focuses on the ability of schools to understand and promote the complex processes involved in ongoing teacher professional development and its relationship with the school as a professional learning environment. The RESPOND Promoting and Monitoring Sustainability Indexes proposes an overall sustainability development framework with particular particular emphasis on identifying factors that facilitate and impede ongoing professional development and school development as a professional learning environment.
The RESPOND project set out to investigate and analyse the complex relationship between teacher professional development and school development as a professional learning environment. RESPOND considers sustainable teacher professional development at the level both of individual teachers and of the schools they teach and build their careers in. The overall aim was to propose a framework with a series of tools designed to promote ways in each of these levels can be mutually sustaining. Each one of the members of the RESPOND partnership has long been actively involved in the areas of teacher professional development and school development addressed by the project and wished to further develop their expertise in the field.They also wished to involve target groups and relevant stakeholders in all the stages of the project activities implemented by covering a wide range of professional profiles and institutional contexts. In particular these included teachers at ISCED levels 1 and 2, staff in faculties of education involved in initial and continuous teacher education programs, as well as those involved in the provision of continuing professional development, senior management in schools and staff from all curricular areas.