The consequences of INSET Martin Lamb Teachers attending short INSET courses are usually exposed to a great amount of new information and ideas. While this can be exciting at the time, the after-effects may be less salutary. This article describes one particular INSET course and the reactions of the participating teachers one year later. It suggests that very few of the ideas presented on the course were taken up in the way anticipated by the tutors, mainly due to the mediating effects of the participants’ own beliefs about teaching and learning. Any INSET course which is seriously concerned with long-term change in teachers’ practice will have to take these beliefs into account. Introduction Short in-service teacher training (INSET) courses - ‘summer schools’, ‘refresher courses’, ‘professional upgrading programmes’ - are familiar phenomena in many countries where English is taught. While they take various forms and are designed to fulfil many different functions, their popularity probably lies in what Widdowson calls the ‘social and professional intensity of the event’ (Widdowson 1987:27): the break in routine, the chance to meet new colleagues and to discuss one’s professional problems. the exposure to lots of stimulating new ideas, the novelty of being students again. The need for Yet how much good do they do? Brian Tomlinson asked the question of ‘follow-up’ courses the short in-service courses he ran for Indonesian schoolteachers and concluded that without subsequent follow-up courses, their effect would have been ‘disastrous’, because the ‘motivation and stimulus (the participants had) gained would soon have been negated by the confusion and frustration they would have suffered in trying to apply all that they had learnt . . . within the existing parameters of syllabus, examinations, materials, official expectations, and class size’ (Tomlinson 1988: 18). Too often, perhaps, the designers and tutors of INSET courses leave the country, or see off the participants, still glowing from the positive evaluations they received in the end-of-course questionnaires, and have little opportunity to discover the longer-term effects of their work. 72 I had the sobering experience of returning to face former INSET participants exactly one year after I had designed and co-tutored a two- week course in ‘Teaching Reading Skills to Undergraduates’. I set out to ELT Journal Volume 49/1 January 1995 © Oxford University Press 1995