A participant-centred approach to INSET course design

INSET course designers often find, much to their disappointment, that the innovations they are promoting fail to be implemented in the manner they had envisioned. This paper considers why even theoretically sound and well-presented innovations may fail to address the practical needs of teachers working in foreign-language environments, and suggests that a higher level of success may be attained through an approach to course design which draws on participants' knowledge of the local learning/teaching situation. A number of practical suggestions are made for how to design such a ‘participant-centred’ INSET course.