Professional Learning Goals

Our goal was to take a closer look at our own practices to further develop a culture of inquiry in the classroom.

Activities and Resources

We met regularly to discuss the articles and book chapters posted in the resources section. A large portion of our time initially went towards creating a common understanding of what sustaining inquiry is and is not. We returned to our initial understanding and revised our thinking many times as new challenges unfolded. We had colleagues come into the classroom to observe what they heard and saw from the teacher and the students to gain a better understanding of the learning environment, the barriers regarding FSL classroom habits, and the types of questions and discussions that were happening. We started with the “Sustaining Inquiry” chapter from Creating Thinking Classrooms. We also looked at the Capacity Building Series “Collaborative Teacher Inquiry,” “Inquiry-Based Learning” and “Getting Started with Student Inquiry.” There are a ton of resources on inquiry so we really tried to narrow in on the critical-thinking aspect and improving the thinking routines that we already have in place in the classroom.

Unexpected Challenges

• Scheduling different staff members to work together
  • i.e., the consultant coming to observe different teachers and being able to observe each other with all the other professional development and release time happening with the school became a challenge
• Timing – it took the team a while to develop the same frame of mind around what inquiry looks like so setting individual goals at the onset concerning the focus of observations was a challenge
• Have everyone be clear about expectations in order to plan and meet more regularly accordingly
• Having a smaller team for scheduling purposes would have been more beneficial

Enhancing Student Learning and Development

• Increase student engagement and accountability for students’ driving their own learning
• Students like that they have the option to explore an aspect that is theirs
• More opportunities for differentiated learning
• Focus on transition from teacher-directed to student-directed – scaffold more clearly so that students are able to incorporate strategies and increase engagement as well
• Have “questioning sessions” incorporated into our planning so that we have critical-thinking, rich questions embedded in our lessons that are scaffolded appropriately
• Look at the units that were already pre-planned and be able to look at them with a new perspective to ask more critical questions and scaffold better

Sharing

We have planned and posted our PowerPoint in the resources section. We will share our learning there so that teachers can wrap their heads around planning for a culture of inquiry in September. The team members are taking their learning back to their grade teams for next year when planning long-range plans together. We also have a forum started on Google+ to continue the conversation between schools and continue learning from each other.

Project Evaluation

The project was a success in that we developed a better understanding of inquiry and we each received books that have strategies that we will continue to work with. Our goal was met because we went through the entire inquiry process as colleagues and then looked at each others’ practices to further prompt each other to think differently. The success arrived when other colleagues wanted to know more about how to step away from scripted conversations and sentence starter conversations and started asking more questions of each other. We should have had a weekly meeting time and stuck to it. Many of us were involved in far too many projects and extra-curriculars at the same time.