ABSTRACT
During recent work on creative teaching in primary schools, my attention was drawn to certain outstanding events. They had won wide acclaim from teachers, other professionals, pupils, parents, academics, advisers, and other members of the public. Some of them had won an award. Initially I was interested in them as individual, exciting educational events. Eventually, however, it became clear that they had common properties, and that they were all examples of the same kind of activity. I term this activity 'critical event'. In the rest of this chapter, I outline a model of how such events are constructed, how they work, and the conditions attending them, The model was derived from the study of the events examined in Chapters 2-5. It is grounded in the empirical data there presented (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). The coding procedures were similar to those recommended by Strauss and Corbin (1990), involving the derivation of a core category (critical event), and its specification in terms of the conditions which give rise to it, the context in which it is embedded, the strategies by which it is handled, and the consequences of those strategies. As far as the sequence of the research went, therefore, it came last. However, it seems necessary to present it fIrst as the central integrating feature of the book. It helps, I hope, to illuminate what follows, and to highlight the features which the events have in common. I concentrate, therefore, on the main pattern of events here. Its substantiation and further particular details will follow with the examples.
