and Humes 2010 ), wherefit-for-purpose practices are explicitly derived from broad
purposes of education, in this case the attributes and capabilities of CfE.^3 It high-
lighted the following processes:
- Stage 1: a conceptual phase which involved developing nuanced understandings
of different curriculum development models, engaging with the‘big ideas’of
the curriculum in Scotland, considering the fitness for purpose of content,
pedagogy and assessment, and addressing contextual conditions (including
identification of barriers and drivers to innovation). - Stage 2: undertaking Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry (CPE), com-
prising three phases: focusing, interrupting and sense making (adapted from an
earlier model in Drew et al. 2008 ) to trial new ways of developing school-based
curriculum development with an impact for teachers’professional learning and
outcomes for students.
These stages are described more fully in the next section.
A second concern related to the sustainability of innovation. The view was taken
at the outset that, while this type of in-the-field partnership working was a slimmed
down version of CCPE, being necessarily less intensive than university-based
Master’s level study, it should not be less robust or conceptually rigorous.
Therefore, the programme ran for an extended period, comprising seven workshops
over an academic session (approximately nine months), with sufficient time (and
space) between sessions for participants to work with colleagues in schools to
develop and evaluate their practice. The role of the external partner (university
researchers) throughout the programme was crucial in this process, to both facilitate
collaboration and to interrupt current processes and practices through challenging
assumptions and taken for granted practices and policies thus developing the crit-
icality. These roles could fall into tension at times, as some of the activities tended
to highlight difference and diversity in values and beliefs, so it was important to
create a safe practical and emotional communicative space for this work (Eady et al.
2014 ). Criticality was promoted through the pedagogies devised by tutors to
facilitate the programme, and enhanced through the central role of reading in the
programme. Participants were expected to engage with research and other academic
texts to critique policies, practices and ideas, and to facilitate the development of a
conceptual framework to inform their planned interruption to practice. Thus,
another major role for researchers was to source and if necessary provide access to
suitable academic resources to inform developments in practice. This was a
time-consuming task, but one which was essential if the programme was to interrupt
(^3) The Four Capacities of CfE have become a sort of mantra for the new curriculum, widely
visible as slogans on posters in schools, but often stripped of meaning. In fact, they form a
useful starting point for curriculum planning, being broken down into a set of key competencies
known as attributes and capabilities, which define the skills and knowledge to be acquired by an
education person. See:http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/learningandteaching/thecurriculum/
whatiscurriculumforexcellence/thepurposeofthecurriculum/index.asp.
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