The Spiral of Inquiry

By Myfanwy Leslie, Year 0-1 teacher

Every year at Sylvia Park School, every kaiako completes a Spiral of Inquiry as part of our professional learning and development.  These spirals align with our school priorities for the year and develop our shared knowledge and understanding about our learners, our community and especially our teaching practice in that area.  

My Spiral of Inquiry this year was inspired by my observation through baseline assessment that a large number of students starting school this year came with knowledge of only a few letter sounds, noticeably less than in previous years.  We were implementing the Better Start Literacy Approach for the first full year as well so I was curious to see how we could best support these students using this approach, while continuing to use a whole language approach to cover concepts of print.

Part of the scanning phase of the Spiral of Inquiry is to gather various types of data about some target students and find out what is really going on for them.  I selected four students who knew 2 or 3 letter sounds and didn’t have other learning or behaviour needs that might impact their learning.  These students told me about their learning and their whānau were also approached to give me insight into what they’re like at home. All of this information was then put together to focus on these students’ specific strengths and needs.  

One of the things I noticed with this group was that they still hadn’t retained some of the letter sounds we had covered even well into the school year.  Some of them had absences from school because of illness, or they tended to get distracted during group activities.  My hunch was that if I revisit the sounds from earlier weeks, then this will provide more exposure to help them commit it to their long-term memory, even though this isn’t part of the programme.

Our team of teachers were all implementing the Better Start Literacy Approach and we all had similar questions about how best to implement it for our specific learners.  We were able to support each other by sharing our observations and what we were doing in our classes and this was really valuable.  There is also an online support community within the programme so we could tap into the experiences of teachers around the country.

We had also read research into cognitive load theory, and that contributed to my decision to try and revisit sounds once the students were already familiar with the structure of the games and activities.  This way they could focus solely on the new sounds we were doing and then learn them the second or third time around. 

Following a Spiral of Inquiry process makes me more disciplined in improving myself and stopping to ask myself where I’m at, how I’m going, and where I can improve or learn more.  It helps me celebrate the small wins along the way.  My Spiral of Inquiry learning becomes part of my toolkit.  It makes me a more experienced, a more knowledgeable teacher.