Blog entries

Rationale

I recently heard a fellow educator liken the development of teaching practice to one's cooking prowess. When we first move out of home, our cooking abilities are presumably quite limited. We might have picked up a recipe or two from our parents by watching them in the kitchen, but when we get desperate or short on time we'll revert to take out or a microwave meal. We know it's not going to give us the best outcome; it might not offer much nutrition or even taste very good. But we don't know what else to do in a tight situation. Likewise, an early career teacher, unless they're one of the lucky few to have a helpful mentor, will typically draw on the few strategies they learned at university or by osmosis from their own teachers back in school.

As we gain more confidence in our cooking, or simply grow tired of pad Thai twice a week, we'll pick up a recipe book from our favourite celebrity chef. We'll follow the recipe step by step and hopefully get some good results. But we won't understand why it works; the flavour combinations and cooking techniques will remain a mystery. I think this like most teacher professional development. We'll get the step by step process of how to teach a particular strategy, maybe a discussion of when to use it, but little understanding of the underlying principles of why it works.

As teachers, we often find ourselves engaged in a pantry challenge - one of those nights where you run out of time to plan a meal and forgot to do the shopping. You're left with the few non-perishable ingredients in your pantry. To make something palatable and nourishing you're going to need to understand how those twenty-four different spices work together, and how to prepare the dried lentils you bought that time you "went vegan" for two weeks. Likewise, that year nine class you've been struggling with all year are still disengaged, and you've tried all the recipes your celebrity chef proclaimed to be effective. To put together a meal that will have your students coming back for seconds, you'll need to have a deep understanding of how they learn, and how to respond to their needs.

In my inquiry toolkit I've attempted to guide our chefs to the next level in mastering the inquiry kitchen - to provide an understanding about what works in inquiry learning, when, for whom, and why. Recipe cards are presented as practical strategies, but the knowledge of when and how to use them effectively is explained in the toolkit.

But inquiry learning isn't just a meal; it's an eight course degustation. One that follows a tried and tested structure but gives the chef freedom to be creative; to bring in their expertise; to appeal to the desires of their customers and the theme of the restaurant. A master chef knows how flavours work together, techniques to combine them, and how to sequence each course to create a powerful culinary experience.

Mastering the inquiry process requires an understanding of:

• your students and how they learn
• what types of learning can be developed through inquiry
• the process of inquiry
• strategies to use at each stage of the process.

Design and analysis tools give insight into achieving each of these desired outcomes. I've attempted to incorporate a series of these tools, frameworks and models into a process for inquiry learning in the context of curriculum outcomes. Too often, teaching strategies are presented without connection to what we're expected to do in our daily practice. This is one of the reasons I decided to develop my own model of inquiry rather than use an existing one; so that teachers can see how inquiry can lead to Australian Curriculum outcomes - mainly the often-neglected general capabilities.

I've also included a range of other inquiry models so that teachers can choose which appeals to them. Perhaps they don't have the privilege of working with colleagues to integrate learning areas, or their school is a "project based learning school". Many of these models are grounded in empirical research and/or informed by the learning sciences. I've therefore used the typical process of these models to inform the steps in the three diamonds model of inquiry. The process followed in these inquiry models is to:

• Ask an answerable question or identify a researchable problem.
• Develop a plan and take some form of action.
• Gather resources; analyse and summarise information.
• Draw conclusions and report findings.
• Reflect on the process. (Audit and Jordan, 2008, in Lupton, 2017)

Apart from making explicit links to the curriculum, I chose to develop a model for inquiry learning with creative commons license so that educators can share, use, and build upon my work. I wanted to develop a resource that is visually appealing and uses diagrams as schemas for understanding and following the process. This wasn't possible to do using trademarked models.

The freedom to modify my model also allows teachers who already share a common language to adapt the model to fit their existing work. As a high school teacher, I've become frustrated at the effect of teachers being siloed in their faculties; the lost opportunities for collaborative teacher professional learning, the separation of knowledge from the student perspective and the inability for them to engage in deep work for more than 55 minutes at a time. I want teachers to have a common language across the school to discuss the process of inquiry, the skills and emotions that students experience at each stage, and to find links between learning areas. I want teachers to see the general capabilities as a shared responsibility and understand how to develop them.

The image above is an attempt to present all the ingredients in my inquiry toolkit in a way that hints at what happens behind the kitchen doors.

The first step is to form an inquiry team. During my time in hospitality, I observed chefs working together to collaboratively plan a new menu, evaluating each recipe with willing participants. Inspired by Khulthau, I suggest the inquiry team collaboratively plans the inquiry, starting with the intended outcomes. What I've realised in developing this toolkit is that the rest of the plan must be flexible to ensure a challenging and engaging experience for every student. This requires the inquiry team to:

• have a shared understanding of their focus - what types of learning will be developed and how
• collaboratively develop a range of assessment and teaching strategies
• identify and respond to the needs of each student by using the right strategy at the right time.

The levels of inquiry concept that is often retweeted with clever visual representations is perhaps then misunderstood. The inquiry shouldn't be seen as having fixed ceilings for student agency, rather the inquiry team should understand how each student may require more or less structure at different stages and with different skills. For example, some students may have the experience to develop their own inquiry processes. Others may require some strategies to help them find and evaluate information. Like all scaffolds, they are designed to come down once the building has the structural integrity to stand by itself.

Questioning frameworks provide a helpful lens to look at guiding students. The first type of questioning the inquiry team will discuss is the use of an essential question to frame an inquiry unit. An essential question can be thought of as a constraint for creativity; to give students some direction to avoid endless flailing and feelings of being overwhelmed. One characteristic of an essential question is that it encourages more questions. Students will ideally generate their own inquiry question related to the essential question of the unit, depending on their readiness.

Like a chef determined to continually improve their cooking by asking another for a second opinion on their flavour combinations and making small adjustments in response to the needs of the dish, teachers in the inquiry team will draw on the experience and expertise of each other to improve their practice. As students move through their inquiry, particularly as they diverge from each other along their journey, they'll require different guidance at different points. The use of assessment in inquiry can be considered to have two purposes:

1. Summative assessment - the culmination of a student's inquiry.
2. Formative assessment - determining where a student is in their inquiry, how they are going, and helping them to get to where they need to be next.

As suggested in the levels of inquiry, the inquiry team will identify potential parameters for the summative assessment task, allowing students to challenge themselves with what they produce. Students should be provided with opportunities to produce authentic products for an authentic audience. It should not be seen as a task to complete for a grade. Rather, the final product is a chance to share their work widely, to test how it lands with a particular audience and to receive feedback for future learning from people outside the inquiry team.

Formative assessment strategies will be used throughout the inquiry. Teachers use process questioning strategies to determine what the student needs to do next. The intention is to gradually release this responsibility to the student - to provide process questioning strategies for students to take ownership over their own learning, and the learning of others.

Something that I underestimated before this task was the importance of information literacy in inquiry learning. I've attempted to highlight the significance of this set of skills through encouraging:

• The teacher librarian as an essential member of the inquiry team
• The exploration of information literacy perspectives
• Evaluation questioning strategies.

A teacher librarian, an expert in information literacy, may be better placed to support students through their information search process. As information literacy is such an essential component of inquiry learning, an inquiry team not only ensures students have the support they might need when they need it, but gives teachers an opportunity to develop their own practice. This in-situ professional learning community (Campbell et al., 2013) allows teachers to work together to plan for and lead student learning, using each other's expertise to make adjustments to the recipe as they respond to judgements of student learning.

One of the most important discussions for an inquiry team to have is around the perspectives on information literacy. If developing an integrated inquiry unit, the temptation might be to address information literacy as simply a generic set of skills with which to find and evaluate information based on limited criteria. However, it's likely that students will need to find, evaluate and synthesise information from a range of disciplines and sources to answer their question. The situated perspective of information literacy must also then be presented, recognising the differences in how we perceive, generate, use, evaluate and value knowledge across learning areas. The transformative and expressive windows are more difficult to incorporate into the inquiry task and must be done so when designing the outcomes and assessment parameters. By allowing students to express themselves, or empower them to make change, we can open up the view that information is subjective and question how it's constructed. This nuanced understanding of information can be facilitated with the careful design of evaluative questions.

The nature of planning and leading inquiry learning is complex and requires teams of educators to work together on a strategy that:

• is focused on the learning outcomes
• acknowledges the expertise within inquiry team
• Uses shared language with common understanding
• Is flexible and supportive to the needs of all students.

My inquiry learning toolkit provides a rough path to follow and asks the inquiry team to look at that path through a number of lenses (the design and analysis tools) to ensure that students are given the right guidance at the right time to develop the wide range of learning outcomes that can be achieved through inquiry.

Final reflection

Read my final reflection where I describe how I've transformed my understanding of inquiry learning.