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My first PhD supervision meeting with Simon Borg was in June 2003, soon after the proposal had been accepted, but 5 months after the course had started. At the meeting, we agreed that I should aim to start collecting data as soon as possible, with a view to tracking volunteer research participants throughout the following five semesters. I therefore needed to prioritize designing an informed consent form. I was also asked to think about how to define and measure self-efficacy beliefs in relation to the effects of the BA program on teaching practice, and to think about how to differentiate my role as a regional tutor on the project – which required me, for example, to help teachers make links between their classroom teaching practices and concepts they had studied on the course – and my role as a PhD student investigating the teachers’ development.

Progress reports I produced over the next 5 months provided an index to my activity and thinking. While I had not considered the dilemmas connected with insider research (Holliday, 2002) in my research proposal, in Progress Report 1, I reflected at length about the challenge in differentiating roles. Since, while interviewing for research purposes, I would likely scaffold responses to promote learning or gain ideas that indirectly led into a lesson plan, conducting the research would probably beneficially affect my teaching practice. Disturbingly, however, participating, I reflected, might give an undue advantage (on an assessed course) to the teachers I was researching and disadvantage those not. Simon and Gary advised me to read about practitioner research and list the potential benefits of participating as a first step in considering how to handle this ethical issue.

Accordingly, I read Anderson and Herr (1999) on practitioner research, and then Holliday (2002) on the “politics of dealing” (while designing a contextually sensitive informed consent form which gained approval before I used it in September 2003 when calling for volunteers). I then reflected on the possible motives for volunteering, producing the following list:

 interest in developing as teachers, students and researchers (by gaining more time to reflect on classroom practice, on the impact of the program, and on ways of conducting research);

 interest in the subject of motivation;

 positive orientation towards the researcher; and/or

 a progressive attitude towards change and personal growth.

Prerequisites for volunteering might have included sufficient self-confidence in self-expression in English. Possibly, too, a relatively liberal, partially Western outlook might have made some more open to the research and thus more willing to volunteer, as the cultural barrier may, in such cases, have seemed lower. Reflecting on the above and the likelihood of possible motives being realized, I concluded that, though the extent of the growth would depend on numerous individual characteristics, participation would likely benefit those who volunteered and were chosen. Therefore, I would need to be scrupulously fair in my role as a regional tutor on the project to ensure that those not participating were not neglected in any way nor had their learning negatively affected (Progress Report 2).

I had also been asked to think about how to define and measure self-efficacy beliefs in relation to the effects of the BA program on teaching practice. In response, in Progress Report 1, I went to great lengths to identify a long list of pedagogical objectives that were sufficiently task-specific to relate to the construct of self-efficacy beliefs. One item, for example, read, “Within a familiar classroom, is the teacher able to adapt teaching materials so that sequences of activities constitute tasks, including preparation, core and follow-up elements (Cameron, 2001)?” It would be possible to elicit self-efficacy beliefs in relation to such a task, by asking questions, such as “How confident are you…?”, “Can you…?” Developing this list of pedagogical objectives helped me primarily to focus on the sort of development I was looking for (e.g., analyzing, adapting, and/or designing tasks for particular learners and using them in the classroom, evaluating them and justifying their use).

The initial data collection started in October 2003 and helped me to develop my ideas. I quickly realized that I needed to elicit not just the teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, but also broader aspects of their motivation, for example, their “sense of relatedness” (Dörnyei, 2001), and I acted accordingly from November 2003. Then, as I carried out preliminary data analysis, I became conscious of the need to explore growth in teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in relation to growth in practical knowledge that is “the knowledge that is directly related to action… that is readily accessible and applicable to coping with real-life situations” (Calderhead, 1988, p. 54). In Progress Report 5, while writing about a teacher then part of the study, I reported:

He was quite convinced, for seven years, that what he was doing in the classroom was absolutely right, so convinced that he planned and taught without really thinking very much about what he was doing. Now there are doubts and questions in his mind, though he is very confident that he can find the right way. Before he was very confident that he could follow the right path. The ideas about the teacher’s role (in interpreting the course materials within the classroom context) are very different, though the self-confidence is fairly constant.

My understanding of research methods appropriate to my study was also developing. In the same report, I articulated the need to triangulate an elicitation of teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs with observation of practice, and with elicitation of practical knowledge, as the following extract demonstrates:

If, for example, a teacher talks confidently about being able to adapt teaching material to include a task framework centered on a core activity (Cameron, 2001), then how am I to verify the accuracy of this claim? One method would be through observation, focusing on behavior, while a second would be through interview, exploring the teacher’s understanding of the underlying concepts (Progress Report 5).

In the first few months of engaging in the research, therefore, my understanding of what I needed to elicit developed (i.e., teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs plus other aspects of motivation, practical knowledge and related cognitions, plus contextual information) and how to do it (using observations as well as interviews). My progress reports reveal that I was also developing sensitivity to issues connected with being an insider researcher. As early as September 2003, I was locating my research on Holliday’s (2002) “progressive qualitative paradigm,” discussing reflexivity, self-criticality, and the researcher’s ideological position; I was also reading and thinking about qualitative concepts such as “trustworthiness,” “validation” (Kvale, 1996), and different kinds of validity, including “catalytic validity” (Anderson & Herr, 1999) (Progress Report 2). Nevertheless, there was some unevenness in my reading and developing knowledge. In Progress Report 3, I discussed case study research explicitly for the first time, and with reference to Yin (1994), which was the only book on case study that was available in the remote region of Oman in which I was working; this must have been commented on in feedback by Simon and/or Gary, since I wrote in Progress Report 4: “I have not as yet been able to read Stake’s work, as suggested, but have requested the book.” Stake (1995) subsequently became a very influential source.