Teaching as Inquiry: How to Love It!

Teaching as Inquiry is a process where teachers explore their own practice and listen carefully to their learners to make decisions on ways to change for the benefit of those learners. Rather than being a box-ticking exercise, Teacher Inquiry can be an interesting, fun and relevant process of learning for teachers and leaders. It is a continuous, reflective and iterative cycle focused on complex pedagogical change.

The Spiral of Inquiry is a popular framework for teachers to use for their own learning because it recognises the real lives of teachers and what it is like to be an adult learner. It gives teachers the space and permission to be learners, to try things out, to make mistakes and to celebrate success.

Misconception
A wrong or inaccurate idea

In my years mentoring and coaching leaders and teachers to implement the Spiral of Inquiry, I have discovered that there are many misconceptions about Teaching as Inquiry. This post provides some clarity about some of the more common misconceptions, how to address them and therefore, how to foster a love of Teaching as Inquiry!

Image by Rebbecca Sweeney

Misconception #1: Inquiry must result in changes in Reading, Writing or Mathematics curriculum knowledge and practice

Not necessarily! We select learners to focus our energies on because they are not having success in Reading, Writing or Mathematics - however, Scanning widely enables teachers to consider a wider range of factors in terms of what might be influencing learner success. We search for strengths and challenges that our learners face both within core learning areas and beyond - even into how they learn when at home. This investigation can lead teachers to locate a complex pedagogical challenge that has little or nothing to do with the teacher's core curriculum knowledge and practice. Pedagogical foci such as self regulated learning, connectedness and relationships are often the starting point. The core curriculum area can be part of the more complex solution, but it doesn't have to be.

Misconception #2: Analysing data is hard

Data is just information. When we Scan our learners we end up with a wide range of data from achievement information, observations, learner and whānau voice, photos, videos, drawings, reflections and more. This can be overwhelming if we allow it to feel that way. The thing is, if we have worked together as a team to gather together some great data about our learners, we will know that data very deeply.

In order to focus on the themes in Scanning, we simply ask ourselves "What popped out during Scanning across all of our learners?". The most important thing here is to:

• be sure that our data is accurate and reliable (with no assumptions)

• have extensive team dialogue about what we have noticed and what is going to give us the biggest impact

My free Focusing Guide developed from the work of Drs Linda Kaser and Judy Halbert can support a team's process to review their data together.

Misconception #3: We must pick the topic of our inquiry from the outset

The spiral of inquiry demands that new learning – how and what we are going to learn – emerges from a thorough scan, is sharpened through focusing, and is informed by the hunches we have developed

Kaser, Halbert & Timperley (2014)

This quote says it all. If we choose the topic of our inquiry at the start, with no evidence from learner voice and observations that dig deeper beyond the surface achievement concern, then we are jumping to the solution too quickly. We are assuming that we have all the answers and know what the problem is. If teachers are told what their inquiry focus is, there is no engagement or commitment from them to the learning that comes next because they were never involved in the process of discovering the evidence that determined the focus.

While Teaching as Inquiry is a great framework for fostering teacher passion in their craft, Teacher Inquiries are not passion projects for staff from the outset. Inquiries emerge from the information we glean from learners and our practices attached to that. Inquiries are about learning and changing our teaching practice - that has to come from evidence about what is working and what is not working so well.

Misconception #4: Inquiries have a finite or set time period

When a focused inquiry emerges, teachers begin working together to Learn, Take Action, change practice and Check for impact. If we are looking to solve complex pedagogical problems, we are hardly going to implement and embed the new practices within a Term or even a year. Inquiries may morph and change over time as we engage in further iterative cycles of activity across the different phases, but they never really end. Genuine Teacher Inquiry is not an intervention for the urgent needs of learners, it is a space for teachers to slow down and deeply consider their own learning needs and to deeply understand their learners before moving forward.

The professional learning research evidence indicates that the integration of substantial new knowledge requires a minimum of a year of focused collaborative effort to make a difference. Two years is much better. With three years of intensive engaged effort, movement towards a transformed learning environment is usually well under way. So space must be created for this to happen.

Kaser, Halbert & Timperley (2014)

Misconception #5: We have to record everything! On Templates!

It is important that staff feel ownership over the Teaching as Inquiry process. Templates can cause staff to reject a process if they feel they are being told what and how to do something in a prescriptive way. This leads to staff describing inquiry as a "tick box" activity that is required of them.

Leaders with good intentions who want to make things easier for staff often create templates with the unintended consequence of staff disengagement. Never use templates as shortcuts. Ways to avoid this are to:

• Co-construct all templates with staff or have staff pull a prepared template apart if they wish to change it to suit their own learning needs

• Really question whether a template is needed 

• Offer mentoring and coaching support as opposed to templates to ease the burden on staff

Many staff question why we need to record things in Inquiry. It is important that we don’t require staff to record things that are of no use, or where there is no real purpose for recording information. Consider the following when deciding whether or not to record aspects of a team inquiry:

• Do we need it to inform current or future actions? (early actions taken in the classroom may inform the solution later on)

• Will recording our reflections and thinking or actions allow us to engage in metacognition? (metacognition and reflecting on what we have learned as a team is a very important part of the learning process - we expect this of learners, so we should expect it of ourselves too)

• Will having a written record support us to meet the requirements of teacher registration later on?

• Will capturing this information be useful at a schoolwide level and are staff clear about this?

It is important to see this phase [taking action] as more than just implementing some new strategies that we learned in the previous phase. By taking action we are deepening our learning... In these complex situations, some actions may be premature and we need to bring collective thinking to the table before leaping in. That is what the inquiry spiral is all about. Otherwise we can get into unproductive cycles of experimentation, disillusionment and abandonment, only to jump to the next thing that may or may not work.

Kaser, Halbert & Timperley (2014)

Grow a love of and a passion for inquiry in your place. I can help you to review your existing inquiry systems and processes to make them more interesting, fun and relevant to use for teachers in any setting and any sector, anywhere. Get in touch with me for a complimentary discovery call about what I can do for you.