Teacher diaries have wide-ranging applications for professional development, as they give teachers an increased sense of responsibility and seek new ways of improving their teaching. This article shares my personal experience of undertaking three teacher diary studies at two-year intervals and reveals how my teaching methodologies and philosophies have changed over time. These diaries helped me pause and reflect upon my personal assumptions of classroom activities, myself as a teacher and the syllabus I was implementing. They reveal how I initially based my interpretations on intuition rather than on insight. This led me to embark on a journey of personal self-reflection that led from an awareness of the practical impact of my teaching style and principles to finally redesigning and developing a syllabus to support my changing ideas on fostering an awareness of the need to promote and internalize the ownership of International English.