Plans for curriculum or pedagogical innovation often lead to little change in practice. Many innovations successful in their early stages fail later, with little post‐innovation analysis to understand why. In Scotland, in 2001, the Scottish Executive Education Department initiated the Assessment is for Learning (AifL) programme. Recognising problems in previous national attempts to improve assessment in Scotland, AifL attempted to explore ways in which an integrated and coherent system of assessment might be developed, with learning and learners at its centre. Two evaluations of the first phase of AifL indicated that the programme was having some impact. Changes in teachers' assessment practices were perceived to have been taking place, but questions remained about why practices were changing and what implications there might be for AifL as it was scaled up. This article offers an interpretative commentary on a study that sought to explore in greater depth issues raised in the two earlier evaluative studies of the AifL programme. While there is widespread recognition that meaningful change is a complex process, the article interrogates ideas of complexity. Finally, the article uses understandings of complexity to challenge simplistic ideas of scaling up projects and concludes that learning how to live with complexity is a necessary feature of designing models for change in classrooms, in schools and in wider educational systems.

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When the occupational therapist meets the patient or client consumer of rehabilitation services, a therapeutic relationship is begun between persons who may have varying developmental backgrounds, value perspectives, social and physical environmental experiences, cultural ties, and lifestyle patterns. In order to develop significant evaluation and treatment strategies appropriate to the personal context of the consumer's life experience, it is the responslbility of the therapist to develop an understanding of the consumer's perspective. The following discussion describes a qualitative research project designed to explore the relationships of work, play, balance, and health in the life continuum of a 38-year-old woman who'suffered severe trauma at the age of 17 and regained control of her life through the development of a pattern of personal responsibility for her health. The study is discussed with regard to project procedures using tape-recorded interviews, outcomes, and applications to academic and clinical education.

Studies of comparative classroom practice in the teaching of secondary English are limited, especially when it comes to exploration of the day-to-day practice of English teachers in the secondary classroom. This book presents a case study analysis of secondary classroom practice in three countries: Canada, England and Scotland. Each country has had different degrees of state involvement within the secondary English curriculum over the last twenty years. England has had the highest degree of state involvement in that it has had several statutory national curricula and a variety of assessment regimes. Scotland has had a non- statutory curriculum and no national tests and Canada has had no national curriculum at all, with education being determined at province level, and each province varying its policies. The research adopts a case study approach involving both classroom observation and interviews with teachers. Through this, the authors explore the impact of state involvement on the reality of what happens in secondary English classrooms. The book invites readers to consider the applicability of the findings to their own contexts, to examine their own practice in the light of this and to consider the nature of the relationships between policy, personal belief and practice in the teaching of English.