10 Great Ways to be an Epic Spiral of Inquiry Leader
Do you support your staff to inquire into and change their practice using evidence? Are you actively supporting them to grow their reflective capability?
Experience and research shows that senior leadership involvement in staff professional learning can support coherence and promote an inquiry mindset in teachers. Ultimately your involvement can make a difference for learners.
A good way to review the role of senior leadership in supporting the Spiral of Inquiry is to first identify:
Who is senior leadership?
Then use the following to identify what you are currently doing and what could be a next step. Remember, what you focus on flourishes.
Celebrate
Be clear about the purpose of the Spiral of Inquiry and celebrate the collaboration among teachers. Celebrate the journey as well as the end goals - the gold found, the questions asked, the research discovered, and more.
Model an Inquiry Mindset
Be curious and enthusiastic about what teachers are learning and doing. Fuel their curiosity. Help them find what excites them! Support them to be interdependent, autonomous learners. Be curious about what is and isn’t working - for what students and under what conditions through investigating Spiral of Inquiry mahi with staff. Read about and promote curiosity in education (e.g. Jamie Jirout or Bill Lucas & Ellen Spencer)
Check in
Meet often with your inquiry leaders/mentors to find out:
How their team’s Spiral of Inquiry is going
What is challenging them
What is exciting them
The focus of inquiries across the school
Spread the Word
Co-construct and share key messages about the Spiral of Inquiry with enthusiasm throughout the school. Cascade messages through all other leaders and out to staff.
Take Spirals of Inquiry to the Big Picture
Use Spiral of Inquiry foci and findings - the hard work of your teachers - to inform strategic direction and prioritisation of resources and learning. Share the school’s strategic direction and priorities and spend time with staff to sensemake these - show how the Spiral has informed the big picture and vice versa.
Share the Data Love
Involve all staff in the analysis and use of schoolwide data. Help staff to ask tough questions about the data they have collected. Provide time for all staff to make meaning from evidence.
Walk the Talk
Do a senior leadership team collaborative inquiry that uses findings and data from staff inquiries.
Give the Gift of Time
Provide time for collaborative inquiry teams to meet at least once every 3 weeks. Make sure leaders and mentors are resourced to support and facilitate the ongoing implementation of collaborative inquiry groups.
Be Present
Attend collaborative inquiry group hui as a guest observer occasionally to hear and see how they operate. Take part in all external professional learning with your staff. Be at all Spirals staff meetings.
Connect
Make contact with at least two other schools using the Spiral of Inquiry and form a small network to combine resources and share knowledge and understandings. Join the Aotearoa Spirals Network and follow them on Facebook. Contact the Aotearoa Network Lead to learn more about connecting nationally and globally.
You can read more about the best moves to make in Drs Linda Kaser and Judy Halberts’ latest book Leading Through Spirals of Inquiry for Equity and Quality. Their Leadership Moves give detailed advice and examples for you to use through every phase of the Spiral.
Grow a love of and passion for teacher inquiry among your educators, while expanding awareness of how every learner can succeed. As Aotearoa’s network lead for NOIIE, I support schools in implementing and embedding improved approaches to teacher inquiry, strengthen conceptual and theoretical knowledge of teams, and build a genuine professional learning culture that people continue to embrace.
Through not-your-typical-boring seminars, workshops and long-term learning support, I facilitate conversations with depth while providing a strongly evidence-based approach to teaching and change (I promise, these are workshops your employees will love to be part of).