Tales from Miss Harvey
"Oh Boy!" Moments
Chapter One: Teacher Inquiry Defined
Nancy Fichtman Dana
Diane Yendol-Hoppey
“Transforming the profession is really the capstone of the teacher inquiry experience.”
What is Teacher Inquiry?
Process-product research: Portrays teaching as a primarily linear activity and depicts teachers as technicians. The teacher’s role is to implement the research findings of “outside” experts (university researchers), who are considered alien to the everyday happenings in classrooms. Teachers are not expected to be problem solvers in this role.
Educational research drawn from qualitative or interpretive studies: Teaching is portrayed as a highly complex, context-specific, interactive activity (descriptions)
Teacher inquiry: Focuses on the concerns of teachers and engages teachers in the design, data collection, and interpretation of data around a central question.
Termed “action research,” teacher inquiry has many benefits:
1. Theories and knowledge are generated from research grounded in the realities of educational practice.
2. Teachers become collaborators in educational research by investigating their own problems.
3. Teachers play a part in the research process, which makes them more likely to facilitate change based on the knowledge they create.
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Teacher inquiry focuses on providing insights into teaching in an effort to make change. Teacher inquirers also make decisions about what is important to study and how to go about studying it based on careful and critical analysis.
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Inquiry involves exciting and meaningful discussions with colleagues about the passions we embrace in our profession.
Teacher Inquiry and Professional Growth:
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Inquiry professionals seek out change by reflecting on their practice. They do this by posing “wonderings,” collecting data along with reading relevant literature, making changes in practice based on new understandings developed through inquiry, and sharing their findings with others. A teacher-inquirer controls her learning.
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Inquiry is synonymous with professional growth and provides a nontraditional approach to staff development that can lead to meaningful change for children.
Evidence for Teacher Inquiry:
1. Teachers themselves who have published their work (pg. 14)
2. University based researchers: research shows that engaging in the inquiry process results in several benefits for both preservice teachers and practicing teachers.
Inquiry and Differentiated Instruction:
Through engaging action research, teachers can generate valuable knowledge about their learners’ readiness, interest, learning styles, etc. With this knowledge, teachers make adaptations to instruction, increasing the probability that the needs of all learners will be met within one single class period or lesson.
Teacher Inquiry, Decision Making, and Progress Monitoring:
1. Data-driven decision making is embedded in teacher inquiry as teachers use assessment data and background information to inform decisions related to planning and implementing instructional strategies at the school, classroom, or individual student levels.
Teachers engaged in progress monitoring follow a series of stages embedded in the teacher research process, 2. including identifying students’ current level of performance, establishing learning goals that will be targeted during the inquiry, monitoring students’ academic performance on a regular basis, comparing expected and actual rates of learning, and adjusting instruction based on these data.
Response to Intervention (RtI):
1. The inquiry process can offer support to students engaged in RtI.
Common Core State Standards and Teacher Inquiry:
1. Teachers are not the recipients of standards, but the architects of their implementation. CCSS are intended to be used as a guide, not a Bible. The standards do not tell teachers how to teach, but rather where they need to go with their students.
Engaging in Teacher Inquiry and the Profession of Teaching:
1. Inquiry is a tool teachers can use when making informed and systematic decisions. Through the inquiry process, teachers can support with evidence the decisions they make as educators and advocate for particular children, changes in curriculum, and changes in pedagogy. Inquiry emerges as action and results in change.
Chapter Two: Finding a Wondering
Wonderings and Questions:
Teachers’ wonderings and questions come from their real world observations and dilemmas.
Teaching requires the interaction among the five elements of context, content, children, the teacher’s own beliefs, and the acts of teaching.
What matters is that you use the passions to conduct a careful and critical analysis of your teaching and explore many possibilities for great wonderings you might choose to pursue.
Passion 1 Helping an Individual Child:
A puzzling child can be a wonderful source for sparking your first wondering. If you are a beginning teacher, this is a common place to develop your inquiry stance toward teaching.
Passion 2 Desire to Improve or Enrich Curriculum:
A curriculum development inquiry is popular for veteran teachers, as they often emerge from a dissatisfaction of “what was” the last time the unit was taught.
This kind of inquiry allows prospective teachers to systematically explore and critique existing curriculum that can lead to changes in their own use or conception of curriculum.
Passion 3 Focus on Developing Content Knowledge:
Focus on developing deeper teacher content knowledge and then identifying the developmentally appropriate content knowledge for the children within the teacher’s classroom.
Inquiry into content requires that teachers begin by posing a question about the content they are teaching. Next, teachers obtain multiple resources and perspectives that can help them respond to that inquiry. After a great deal of background research, the teacher is able to structure students’ learning around key ideas.
Passion 4 Desire to Improve or Experiment with Teaching Strategies and Teaching Techniques:
Strategies: cooperative learning, role play, simulation, lecture, and discussion
Teaching techniques: questioning, assessing, student learning, and integrating technology into instruction.
Systematically studying teaching strategies and techniques can lead to discoveries that would not have become apparent in the absence of systematic study, and these discoveries ultimately lead to new and significant change in teaching practice.
Passion 5 Desire to Explore the Relationship between your Beliefs and your Classroom Practice:
Inquiry can be found at the intersection of teaching philosophy and the ability to critically self-reflect on classroom management.
Passion 6 The Intersection of your Personal and Professional Identities:
Focus on who you are as a person and a teacher and further exploring one of your own personal passions and the ways those passions play out of your teaching.
Passion 7 Advocating Social Justice:
This passion comes from the desire to effect social change by exploring questions of race, class, gender, or ability. Effecting social change in regard to issues of social justice may become the focus for your entire teaching career.
Sometimes the most important contribution of an inquiry is not in finding the definitive answer to a research questions posed by a teacher, but in serving as a catalyst to uncover and discover hidden assumptions and issues about teaching and learning that pervade school.
Inquiry can become a catalyst for social change.
Passion 8 Focus on Understanding the Teaching and Learning Context:
Context represents a particular classroom within a particular school, within a particular state, and within a particular country.
Ex. Abandoning typically grade level and classroom structures.
What Happens if I Cannot Locate my Wondering?
If you struggle to find your question, you should collaborate with and talk to other educators.
Independently exploring each of the lenses without engaging in discussion with others may not lead to a question, so the passions should be explored and discussed with a wide variety of people.
Reflection
The inquiry process is something that has interested me since last semester in Language Arts One (my notes of Dr. Yendol-Hoppey can be found under that tab). This process is something that has been implemented throughout the college curriculum, and I have experienced it first hand at the Learning Academy. My reflections are based not only on my observations on the class, but on my case study student and the questions that I have regarding that weekly experience. For example, I have been taught, and thus, it has become second nature, to continuously ask myself “what if” and “why” questions that dig dip into further understanding. The case student I have been working individually with this spring semester is a fine example of the first step in the inquiry process (passion one). It is apparent that something is not working or is not “clicking” with Hannah, my case study student. Thus, I have begun the inquiry process- finding and pinpointing the skills that she needs help with that may be preventing her from fully understanding phonics. In other terms, the inquiry process can be considered a research project. It does not necessarily have to be on one student or on a whole class, it can be on a risky topic that may confront me in the future. Being told what to conduct (at the Learning Academy) and deciding on my own what I should conduct are two different topics. A wondering I have is, how do I know what inquiry is considered too risky and what inquiry I should push forward with despite the consequences? I suppose the answer comes with time and with the administration that comes my way. I recently listened to a guest speaker at my college who spoke about her administration and the support she had during her inquiry process. The inquiry/research she conducted ended up being beneficial, yet risky (going off the “common core” road and using other materials not specified in the curriculum). The risk was that it would not work and may even set the student scores further back. However, her inquiry proved beneficial and she set a fine example for the rest of her colleagues (inquiry is now a common thought process in that school). I want to be that example and that change through the inquiry process. Knowing what to inquire about and what to research comes with more experience in the classroom, and I cannot wait for that time to come.