Narrow Your Inquiry

Name a Priority Question

Objective: Make collective meaning of your team’s data overview and name a Priority Question

Purpose: The purpose of the Priority Question is to begin to narrow your team’s focus of inquiry. The Priority Question should represent a path your team is genuinely motivated to investigate and doesn’t already know the answer. This is the launch of your inquiry and will likely be directly guided by your school’s Instructional Focus.

Recommended time: 30-45 minutes

Preparation: Don’t be deceived by the relative simplicity of this protocol - there is a lot of pre-thinking required to make this a successful meeting!

For support with question generating, please refer to the Right Question Institute's Question Formulation Technique

This step is often done at the ILT or administrative team level: a whole-school Priority Question is named to launch all teams’ inquiry cycles. However, if your team is creating its own Priority Question, you as the facilitator should co-create with your administration team a Data Overview that displays student performance with the focus area and narrowed to skills that will be assessed on an upcoming interim assessment. Use the Data Display Checklist to ensure your team will easily read and interpret the information.

Send your team the portions of the assessment that are represented in the data overview. This may be a text and a prompt, some math problems, a lab report, etc. If the actual items are not readily available you might be able to find similar items - for example, if your data display represents state standardized tests. If you don’t have the assessment items or a close representation, you might want to consider a different data display.