Understanding Living Standards of Judgement
Living standards of judgement are the personally embodied values, beliefs, and practices that individuals use to assess the quality and impact of their own work in real time. Rather than relying solely on externally imposed criteria, practitioners develop internal standards that are lived out in practice and then made explicit through reflection, documentation, and dialogue. These standards become a way of answering the question: How do I know I am improving my practice in ways that are good for me, for others, and for the wider community?
At their core, living standards of judgement are dynamic. They evolve as practitioners encounter new experiences, insights, and challenges. They do not remain abstract ideals; instead, they show themselves in concrete actions, decisions, and relationships. When articulated clearly, they offer a powerful framework for professional growth and for evaluating educational, social, or organizational change.
From Embodied Knowledge to Public Knowledge
Embodied knowledge refers to the tacit understanding gained through lived experience—what people know in their bones but may not yet have put into words. This includes intuitive responses to situations, a sense of ethical responsibility, and the practical wisdom that guides day-to-day decisions. However, embodied knowledge remains largely invisible until it is expressed, examined, and shared.
The transformation of embodied knowledge into public knowledge happens when individuals create narrative accounts, case studies, research reports, or multimedia representations of their work. They make their values and standards visible, subjecting them to the critical scrutiny of others. In this way, personal insights become part of a shared body of professional and scholarly knowledge that can inform practice more widely.
Public knowledge is therefore not just what is published or formally recognized; it is knowledge that others can understand, critique, and use. Turning a personal standard of judgement into a living, public standard involves a process of clarification, testing, and validation in relation to real-world outcomes—especially when those outcomes concern the learning and well-being of students, colleagues, or communities.
Mike Bosher: Developing and Sharing Living Standards of Judgement
Mike Bosher’s work offers a compelling example of how an educator can develop living standards of judgement and move from tacit, embodied understanding to explicit, shareable knowledge. Through sustained reflection on his professional practice, Bosher identified the values that truly guided his decisions—such as respect, authenticity, responsibility, and a commitment to improving learning experiences.
Instead of treating these values as vague aspirations, he turned them into living standards by asking, What does it look like in practice when I live these values fully? This question pushed him to examine specific episodes in his work, to gather evidence of impact, and to recognize the tension between what he claimed to value and what actually happened in the classroom or professional setting. Moments of success, as well as moments of contradiction, both played essential roles in refining his standards.
By documenting this process—through written narratives, collaborative discussions, and critical feedback—Bosher made his embodied knowledge accessible to others. His journey illustrates how a practitioner’s lived experience can be transformed into a form of public knowledge that supports shared learning. Importantly, his living standards of judgement became a means for others to examine, compare, and develop their own practice, rather than a rigid template to be copied.
Living Standards of Practice and Judgement in Educational Research
Living standards of judgement are closely connected to living standards of practice—the visible expression of one’s values in day-to-day professional action. Educational research that takes practice seriously often blurs the line between being a practitioner and being a researcher; educators inquire into their own work as part of their effort to improve it. In this context, standards of judgement must be grounded in what actually happens in classrooms, schools, and communities.
Such research typically involves cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. As practitioners scrutinize these cycles, they begin to articulate the standards by which they judge improvement: Is student learning deeper, more meaningful, more equitable? Are relationships more respectful and dialogical? Do learners experience greater agency and well-being? These questions become the lived criteria that guide professional growth.
Living standards of practice are not static benchmarks. They are continually re-negotiated as educators encounter new student needs, changes in policy, or evolving social contexts. Yet, because they are rooted in lived values, they offer stability and coherence: practitioners know what matters most to them, and they can explain why certain changes count as genuine improvement rather than superficial compliance.
Heather Knill-Griesser’s Vision Quest of Support
Heather Knill-Griesser’s M.Ed. dissertation, titled Vision Quest of Support to Improve Student Learning: Validating My Living Standards of Practice, provides a focused exploration of how an educator can name, test, and validate living standards of practice. Her work positions the concept of a “vision quest” as both a metaphor and a methodology: a purposeful journey of inquiry into what it means to support students effectively and ethically.
Rather than assuming that external metrics alone could demonstrate improved learning, Knill-Griesser centred her own values and experiences. She asked what genuine support for student learning looked and felt like in real situations. This inquiry led her to surface key standards, such as relational trust, responsiveness to individual learner needs, and a commitment to students’ holistic development, not just their test scores.
Through systematic reflection, evidence gathering, and critical dialogue, she tested whether these self-identified standards actually held up in practice. Were her actions consistent with her stated values? Did students experience the learning environment as supportive and empowering? By interrogating her own work in this way, she moved from privately held convictions to living standards of practice that could be publicly articulated and evaluated.
Validating Living Standards of Practice
Validation is a crucial stage in transforming personal practice into credible, shareable knowledge. In the context of living standards of practice, validation does not mean claiming perfection or universal truth. Instead, it involves offering clear, evidence-based accounts of practice and inviting others to judge whether the claims made are reasonable, grounded, and educationally significant.
For Knill-Griesser, this meant gathering narratives, classroom observations, student feedback, and other forms of qualitative evidence that could illuminate whether her living standards were genuinely guiding improvements in student learning. She used the notion of support as a central thread, exploring the many ways in which learners experience care, challenge, scaffolding, and recognition.
The process of validation also included dialogue with peers, supervisors, and wider professional communities. By opening her work to critique, she strengthened the robustness of her standards. The iterative refinement of her living standards of practice—based on both internal reflection and external feedback—ensured that they were not only personally meaningful but also publicly defensible.
Connecting Bosher and Knill-Griesser: A Shared Commitment to Living Standards
Although their specific contexts and inquiries differ, the work of Mike Bosher and Heather Knill-Griesser converges around a shared commitment: to make professional values and standards explicit, lived, and improvable. Both engage deeply with the notion that professionals are not merely implementers of external policies; they are creators of knowledge whose lived experiences can shape the evolving standards of their fields.
Bosher exemplifies the move from embodied knowing to publicly articulated living standards of judgement, showing how individual reflection can influence collective professional dialogue. Knill-Griesser extends this work by demonstrating how such standards can be validated in relation to a central educational purpose: improving student learning through meaningful support.
Together, their contributions highlight an important shift in educational theory and practice: the recognition that valid standards of judgement can emerge from within practice itself. Instead of seeing standards as imposed from outside, they are generated, tested, and refined through a living inquiry conducted by practitioners who care deeply about their students and communities.
Implications for Educators and Practitioners
The examples of Bosher and Knill-Griesser offer several practical implications for educators and other professionals who wish to articulate and live their own standards of judgement and practice:
- Start from lived values: Identify the values that truly matter to you in your work—such as inclusion, respect, justice, or creativity—and ask how they currently show up in your daily practice.
- Document concrete episodes: Keep reflective records of specific situations where your values were clearly enacted or challenged. These narratives become the raw material for articulating your standards.
- Turn values into criteria: Translate your values into observable criteria for judging improvement. For example, if you value student voice, what specific practices indicate that voice is being honoured?
- Invite critical friendship: Share your accounts of practice with trusted colleagues who can offer constructive questioning and alternative interpretations of your evidence.
- Refine standards iteratively: Expect your living standards of practice to evolve as you encounter new insights, tensions, and successes. Revision is a sign of growth, not failure.
By engaging in these processes, practitioners not only enhance their own professional integrity but also contribute to a richer, more nuanced understanding of what counts as quality in their field.
Living Educational Theory and the Expansion of Public Knowledge
The notion of living standards of judgement has strong links with living educational theory, a research approach in which practitioners ask, How do I improve what I am doing? and generate their own explanations of educational influence in the world. In this tradition, theories are not static propositions but evolving accounts of practice, grounded in the practitioner’s values and validated through real-world evidence.
Incorporating living standards of practice into such research helps ensure that the resulting theories remain connected to moral purpose and to the lived experiences of learners. Instead of assuming that theory must come from outside practitioners’ contexts, living educational theory acknowledges that teachers, leaders, and other professionals are capable of creating valid, generative knowledge.
Every time a practitioner like Bosher or Knill-Griesser turns their embodied knowledge into a carefully argued, evidence-rich public account, they expand the collective repertoire of educational understanding. Their work encourages others to see themselves not only as users of theory but as active contributors to a growing, living body of public knowledge.