How to develop an enquiring disposition towards your professional practice

Practitioner enquiry in the Professional Standards

The Professional Standards expect teachers and college lecturers to adopt an enquiring disposition, making practitioner enquiry a central aspect of their pedagogy and professionalism. This approach enables teachers and college lecturers to:

• deepen their knowledge of learning and teaching
• critically assess the impact of their teaching on learners, and
• use evidence to guide their judgements and effectively plan and deliver high quality learning.

Practitioner enquiry is a key element emphasised in the Professional Standards for teachers and lecturers in Scotland. These standards outline the expectation that teachers and lecturers adopt an enquiring stance to continuously enhance their professional practice and improve learner outcomes.

For teachers, this involves developing a profound understanding of learning and teaching, critically analysing the impact of their practice on learners, and collaboratively using evidence to inform judgments and plan next steps.

Similarly, the Professional Standards for Lecturers in Scotland's Colleges highlight the importance of self-evaluation, critical self-reflection, and collaborative professional enquiry. These practices aim to deepen professional knowledge and understanding, refine teaching practice, and enhance student engagement.

Standard for Full Registration

Standard for Lecturers in Scotland's Colleges

Why should I develop an enquiring stance?

Practitioner enquiry should lead to deep transformative learning that significantly informs and influences professionals’ understandings, practice and subsequent impact. However, for any sustainable change and impact on professional practice, you need to understand enquiry as a process and not as disconnected acts, events or isolated projects.

Being an enquiring professional is not simply about teachers learning the research skills, techniques and methods of enquiry and conducting enquiries into practice regularly. Instead, it is much more about developing the knowledge, skills, dispositions and understanding required to become the kind of professionals who can question, challenge, understand and know deeply about teaching and learning.

It can and should be a challenging journey. It can and should reveal what Mockler and Groundwater-Smith (2015) call ‘unwelcome’ and often uncomfortable truths about what is actually happening e.g. during the learning and teaching process and through this process extend our knowledge and confidence in our practice. This has important implications for the design of an enquiry.

An enquiring professional is:

• adaptive
• open to change
• critically engaged with their context and practice
• aware that, if enquiry is to have a genuinely transformative effect on their professional understanding and practice, then it should reveal difficult truths that are acted upon.  

This is a flexible, evolving and ongoing process of ‘becoming’.

How to adopt an enquiring stance

Education Scotland have a range of resources to support you at every stage of your enquiry journey. Read more on Education Scotland's website.

Learning that deepens knowledge and understanding

Teachers develop their subject and pedagogical knowledge through engaging in enquiry. The very nature of practitioner enquiry demands that individuals bring their current knowledge and understandings and open these up to scrutiny and questioning.

Enquiry is the basis for reflective and strategic thinking about practice (metacognition) and becomes the methodology for professional learning. It requires an informed theoretical rationale that underpins the enquiry and a reflection of how the research, literature or policy has changed thinking and practice. This is done through extended reading in the area of theory and research, and as appropriate the subject matter itself. Teachers need to develop this knowledge to be able to ask critical questions through their enquiry. They develop the knowledge by asking critical questions and examining practices and engaging in wider reading.

It is important that the taken-for-granted practices and knowledge are brought into question and examined alongside distinctly ‘new’ knowledge and pedagogical understandings.

The Research area in MyGTCS offers access to a wider range of resources:

1. Education Source - provides access to over 1,700 education journals
2. eBooks – provides access to eBooks under the themes of Assessment, Enquiry & Research, Leadership, Learning for Sustainability, Professional Learning, Social Justice and Learning, Teaching and Pedagogy

Guide to using MyGTCS research section

Asking critical questions

Being critical is about asking questions to interrogate the norms and routines of your practice. Critical questions and reflection help to:

• challenge assumptions
• offer a new lens with which to view practice
• make informed decisions about practice
• prevent ‘groupthink’ by offering stimuli to encourage different perspectives

Engaging in critical thinking involves questioning your current practice to:

• bring about fundamental changes in pedagogy through enquiry
• develop a deeper understanding and questioning of theory, policy and practice
• question, develop and evidence for their practice in more meaningful ways
• develop deeper knowledge, understanding and skills in research
• understand our own and our students’ learning more deeply
• accurately and creatively assess and generate evidence of impact on learners and learning
• become critically informed
• engage in deep, sustained and transformative professional learning
• critically question and challenge educational assumptions, beliefs and values
• become adaptive experts

Being critically informed means being able to:

• draw on a range of sources to justify choices relating to your practice
• evaluate the credibility, relevance and appropriateness of sources
• recognise that viewpoints different to your own have value
• balance your contextual knowledge, as well as personal and professional experiences alongside other sources of information to generate deep professional awareness
• think about professional choices through the lens of theory as well as practice

Transformative teaching and learning

The idea underpinning transformative teaching is that the purpose of education is to support the development of a more just world. The objective of transformative practice is to help learners make sense of the power structures that govern their lives to enable them to think critically about the world they are inheriting from previous generations and about their rights and choices.

Transformative teaching and learning are a product of being willing to ask hard questions about why things are the way they are and what can be done to effect change for the better.

When teachers take an enquiring stance towards their teaching, they model a critical, questioning approach to learners that contributes to transformative thinking.

PRD for Teachers and College Lecturers

Self-evaluation and practitioner enquiry

Self-evaluation is an important aspect of enquiry. While reflection involves engaging in a thoughtful process of considering events or incidents and your role in the outcome of these, self-evaluation is a more evidence-focused process. When you self-evaluate, you are aiming to measure your progress in an area of professional learning.  

Self-evaluation involves:

• asking deep and searching questions about self and practice
• considering the needs of learners/colleagues in your context
• using the GTC Scotland Professional Standards to inform and guide your reflections and actions
• using other influencing factors such as whole setting or departmental improvement plans; other standards or targets; issues or guidelines relevant to your setting or context
• using evidence from a range of sources to inform and support your self-evaluation
• using your ongoing reflections and enquiry into practice

You may find our professional reflection and self-evaluation tools useful for planning professional learning, engaging with the professional standards to enable deep thinking about progress in areas of your practice.