Digging deeper into practitioner enquiry: Professional learning partners
This page brings together a range of professional learning partners who offer rich opportunities for educators engaged in practitioner enquiry.
Each partner provides avenues for exploring questions emerging from practice, engaging with research, connecting with professional communities, and developing enquiry approaches that are embedded, iterative, and professionally empowering.
Explore the organisations below to access professional learning opportunities, resources, and communities that can help you investigate your practice, generate new insights, and strengthen outcomes for learners.
The University of Glasgow’s Centre for Teaching Excellence is a collaborative national Centre for innovation, research, professional learning, and system-wide improvement. It works closely with teachers to strengthen practice, advance pedagogical expertise, and help shape the future of Scottish education.
The Centre enables teachers across Scotland to access, use and generate research through Communities of Practice and Practitioner Enquiry Networks and engage in research-focused collaborative CLPL across the CfTE Research Hubs:
- Teaching-focused Research.
- Gaelic Education.
- Rural Education and Learning for Sustainability.
- Pedagogy to support attainment in diverse classrooms.
- Innovation in pedagogy to enhance classroom practice.
- Digital education and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in advancing pedagogy.
Together, the hubs create a coherent national infrastructure for research informed professional learning, offering practitioner enquiry support and collaborative opportunities that strengthen teaching practice across Scotland.
Teachers and college lecturers are expected to take an enquiring approach as part of the professional standards.
Being an enquiring professional means developing the knowledge, skills, understanding and attitudes needed to question assumptions, reflect critically on your teaching, and use evidence to make informed professional decisions. Teaching is complex and built on relationships, so the standards highlight the importance of professional values in helping teachers understand, question and improve teaching and learning.
This article from GTC Scotland explains more about what it means to develop an enquiring approach and includes links to further reading.
The Open University has a wide range of free professional learning resources for supporting practitioner inquiry through their OpenLearn hub for educators.
The following resources may be of particular interest:
- Appreciative approaches to inquiry
- Sustainable pedagogies
- Becoming an ethical researcher
- Supporting children's mental health and wellbeing
All of these free resources have embedded activities to help you explore and think reflectively about your practice.
Developing and sustaining reading for pleasure (primary) is a national online programme for primary teachers which aims to enhance their professional knowledge and practice of reading for pleasure pedagogies to support children to become frequent regular readers.
Developing and sustaining reading for pleasure (primary) is run by Scottish Book Trust and is endored by Education Scotland.
This resource showcases some of the interesting practitioner enquiry posters created by participants in the Developing and Sustaining Reading for Pleasure (Primary) course.
The EIS Action Research Grants scheme provides practical support and funding to support teachers and lecturers to carry out practitioner‑led action research within their own professional settings.
The grants are designed to help educators investigate an aspect of their practice, gather and analyse evidence, share their findings and use their research to improve learning and teaching.
The programme supports professional growth, collaboration, and inquiry‑based practice, and offers opportunities to share learning with colleagues through published project reports.
