This paper reports on one aspect of a ten month pilot study jointly funded by the Scottish Government and the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) to explore means of evaluating the impact of the Chartered Teacher initiative which was introduced in 2003. This established Chartered Teacher as a status for accomplished teachers that would be demonstrated through qualification and be rewarded by an enhanced salary. Whilst this initiative is unique it stems from a common concern amongst international policy makers to improve the quality of teaching in schools. In many countries this has resulted in efforts to extend the professional development of teachers well beyond induction (OECD, 2005;EC, 2007). This extension of teachers’ professional development has been accompanied by an emphasis on the use of advanced occupational standards and evidence-based practice as a means of enhancing professional learning (Ingvarson & Kleinhenz, 2006) and evidence-based practice as a means of enhancing professional learning (Hargreaves, 1999; Joyce, Calhoun & Hopkins, 1999).

In the UK and the USA there has been a movement towards engaging established teachers in practitioner research as part of a pragmatic, practice-based approach to enhancing teacher skills (TDA, 2009; Cochrane-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Thus Chartered Teachers in Scotland are required to demonstrate they have achieved the Standard for Chartered Teacher (SE, 2002) by carrying out and reporting on a work based project to improve pupils’ learning as part of a GTCS accredited course, the successful completion of which assures them of Chartered Teacher status. The resulting assignments are treated as evidence of enhanced practice, their quality being assured through the compliance of CT programmes with the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework assessment criteria for postgraduate qualifications at masters level (SCQFB, 2004).

Establishing a connection between changes in teaching practice and pupils’ learning is fraught with difficulty. Whilst methods have been developed to measure teacher effectiveness in terms of pupils’ rates of progress and attainment using value-added methods these are based on large-scale studies requiring the comparison of longitudinal data derived from a limited sampling of pupil attainment (Day et al. 2006). One of the inherent limitations of such methodologies is that they can tell us little about how changes in the teaching process impact directly on pupils’ learning in the course of educating activity (Clare & Aschbacher, 2001). It is important, in evaluating and developing the Chartered Teacher initiative, that information is made available to both teachers and Chartered Teacher (CT) programmme providers that may help them to examine the question of impact on pupil learning as a processual and relational parameter of pedagogic practice. Knowing how we might describe and examine the outcomes of the adoption of specific teaching approaches in classroom contexts should serve to support the development of teachers’ professional knowledge and practice. In exploring what evidence might most usefully serve this end, one of the objectives of the pilot study was therefore to evaluate the means currently being used by Chartered Teachers to evidence the impact of their practice on pupils’ learning.

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