Professional development often sidesteps pedagogical practice and emphasizes strategies and techniques for planning curriculum and learning activities, managing behaviour, and aligning routines. This shortchanges educators’ right to be supported as thinkers, as researchers, as co-constructors of knowledge, as participants in a culture of inquiry.

When we shift our orientation, though, and make inquiry rather than instruction our priority, we begin to live into new possibilities for educational leadership. We become more attentive to creating possibilities than to pursuing predefined goals, focusing on what Peter Moss calls “the organization of opportunities rather than the anxiety of pursuing outcomes”.