Scanning & Focusing

Scanning: What's going on for our learners? How do we know? Why does it matter?

Through our scanning process, we gathered a range of evidence from across the school—student data, classroom observations, and staff conversations. As we looked for patterns, we noticed that while there were many thoughtful and responsive practices happening in individual classrooms, they were often isolated and varied widely in focus and approach.

We also observed that staff were engaging in reflection and problem-solving, but without a shared framework, these efforts sometimes lacked coherence, depth, or connection to one another. This made it difficult to build collective momentum or to clearly track the impact of our work on student learning.

These observations led us to realize that what was missing was not commitment or care, but a common language and structure for inquiry. We began to see the need for a shared framework that could support teachers in moving beyond intuition and isolated efforts toward more intentional, evidence-informed cycles of learning.

This led us to focus on the Spiral of Inquiry as a way to anchor our work. The Spiral provides a clear, flexible process that helps educators move from scanning and focusing, through developing hunches, to taking action and checking for impact.

As a result, we recognized the importance of not only introducing this framework, but also creating the expectation and support for teachers to engage in their own collaborative inquiry processes. By doing so, we aim to build a more coherent, collective approach to improving student learning—one that honours the unique context of each classroom while connecting our efforts as a school community.

Focusing: Where will we concentrate our energies? What will give us the greatest impact?

Research on school improvement points to collaborative inquiry as the surest way to explore complex problems and make lasting improvements. The Spiral of Inquiry offers a field-tested approach to collaborative inquiry. It helps educators, working in teams, to get curious about what is going on for their students and to investigate what will improve student outcomes.

~ Brooke Moore, June 2020