ABSTRACT
have shared aspects of my own experiences and insights in all previous chapters, but in this one, I provide more detail about our own journey and insights of teachers. This illustrates many of the messages contained in previous chapters, and shares the journeys in the schools I led. All of this will be illustrated by individual journeys made by some of our teachers as well as my own. I explore the support we received and the obstacles we faced, and how we reached the point of being able to support ourselves and others, both in school and across schools. This chapter details our eight years of engagement with practitioner enquiry, from our initial steps to a position of confidence with many teachers having ‘inquiry as stance.’ I look at the insights gained and the lessons learned from our long-term commitment to a new model of professional and school development. I consider how our journey supported us with the introduction of the ‘Curriculum for Excellence’, allowing us to take charge of our development journey and not have this imposed on us by others who really didn’t know us as well as ourselves. The chapter explains our rationale and our vision for what we were trying to achieve, then how we delivered this within previous busyness and demands of all we had to do. This chapter makes visible the realities of such an engagement, the gains we achieved, as well as the issues we had to deal with on our journey. You will see how we quickly scaled up small changes to have bigger impacts within our schools and beyond, as we came to better understand our system leadership roles and responsibilities. All of this is illustrated with real examples and evidence from our journey.
