Using story to promote continuing professional development for teachers

Abstract

The author is a deputy headteacher in a large mixed comprehensive school. Her responsibilities include ‘continuing professional development”, and she began an action research project on how she could develop not only her role in becoming more reflective in her daily practice, but also, how she could develop opportunities for teachers to take time to reflect on and improve pedagogical practices. She worked with a department for some time and collected data about their activities. She used ‘story” to put together pieces of this data and to enable her to interpret her experiences. This paper records a story she wrote which helped her to understand better the process of staff development. As a result of reflecting on the story and on conversations which followed writing it, she realised the need for teachers to be in greater control of their own learning and to start from where they are now, rather than from where the staff development co-ordinator thinks they might or ought to be. © 1998 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.