Over many years of working with inquiry-based approaches in schools, I have relished the opportunity to explore ways to extend the approach to the teachers themselves. When I became particularly interested in personal inquiry for children around a decade ago, I gradually widened my focus to explore the potential of personalised, professional inquiry for staff. I continue to see this as a really valuable way not only to build teacher capacity but to strengthen everyone’s understanding of what it means to bring an inquiry stance to our work.
Professional, personal inquiries are ultimately not only about discovering but about transforming both the teacher and the learners in their care. This concept is not new. The idea of teacher inquiry is, for example, strongly embedded in school throughout NZ where it connects to the cycle of action research. Other ‘situated professional learning’ approaches have been around throughout my teaching career and well before that. There is an enormous body of research on teacher inquiry - this blog post (already too long!) is not the place to explore it. I will simply share one more recent voice from the field whose work I have been reading lately. UK based researcher and head teacher Dr Kulvarn Atwal writes:
“My research found that teacher engagement (in their own learning) is dependent on how well the activities are personalised to their own and their children’s needs…when teachers engage in professional learning they don’t see as relevant to their needs, they rarely persevere...The informal aspect of this teacher choice is that we develop practitioners who are self-motivated, independent learners… They are not engaged in professional learning that is done ‘to’ them they are driving their own learning, eager to continually improve.” (2019: 32-34)
I have been fortunate to have partnered with Bonython School in Canberra for several years now. It has been wonderful to watch the careful and thoughtful way the leadership team and the staff as a whole have worked on growing a culture of Inquiry from the ground up. As is the case for several schools I work with, one feature of their work is the expectation that educators will engage in their own inquiry journeys throughout the year. I invited deputies Marc Warwick and Amanda Hawkins to chat to me about their approach, late last year and share some key moments from our conversation including some teacher reflections here.
Kath (K) So, what exactly ARE ‘educator inquiries’ at Bonython Primary School ?
We have both come from other settings that introduced us to the idea of professional learning through engaging teachers as inquirers. At Bonython, we expanded this idea to include all educators - including all of our support staff so we are careful to describe these ‘educator inquiries’ rather than just the teachers. Basically, it means that each adult in our learning community commits to an investigation of their choice, exploring a professional interest, passion or area of need. They are usually linked to the work they are currently doing with students but not necessarily . They select a focus early in the year and work on it across the year with a celebration and sharing at the end.
What were some of the questions your educators explored through the year?
There was such a range! But some examples are:
How can learning in the outdoors grow students capacity to think creatively to come up with new ideas and solve problems?
How can I get to know how autism presents in the students I teach, and how can I get to know them as individuals to find out how they learn best?
As an Inquiry School, to what extent is our approach to using split-screen teaching achieving what we want with our student learners?
How can I develop my understanding of the Inquiry process through play?
What is anxiety, what does it look/feel like and how can I best support someone experiencing it? How can we create a safe, supportive and positive environment for our rainbow community?
K. Why have you taken this approach at Bonython?
The most important aspect of this is that the process allows our educators to develop their inquiry mindset by explicitly practising what it means to be an inquirer. And we want a strong inquiry mindset throughout our community. We really want to position the ‘grown ups’ as inquirers which means they can relate to and empathise with the experiences of our younger learners across the school as they engage in this kind of learning. We feel that everything we do with our teaching team should mirror what we are asking them to do with our students. We are trying to build that cultural marker you have written about: that ‘professional learning itself should be inquiry based’.
K.This is quite an undertaking for staff. How have you managed to get ‘buy in?’
When we first started, some people were reluctant and fearful. Especially the support staff who are not ordinarily asked to work in this way. But they are actually our real success story. In their enterprise agreement there is an expectation that they will do some professional learning. So we have said, ‘well, the way we do this is through inquiry’. Some of them had not had great experience in their own schooling and many were worried about having to ‘present.’ We really had to give a lot of support. We had to say ‘We are going to do this, but we hear you are uncomfortable, we hear your concerns and we will accommodate them.
When we had our celebration at the end of the year one of the people who had been reluctant came and gave us a hug and said that we had ‘kept our word’ – that the experience was great and she was eager for her next inquiry. She was the first person to take the new LSA’s under her wing this year and say ‘this is great. Now the experiences LSA’s are supporting the new ones. We also brought people in from our previous school (Macquarie PS) to share their stories. One of those teachers asked: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid’ . That really resonated with people.
K. I would say another reason why you have people on board is that you had already built a strong inquiry culture prior to introducing the professional inquiries. My impression is that people felt excited about the direction you were heading in, they trusted the leadership, liked each other and liked working at the school. ALL that helps with people’s willingness to go with something new.
That’s true. Marc and Greg (principal) had been working on building that culture two years before I (Amanda) came here so it was a great foundation to build on. We started with building the capacity of our young learners to inquire and then moved to strengthening our educators identity as inquirers as well.
K. So, you say educators choose something to investigate that they are interested in. Are there any criteria? Does it, for example, have to connect with your strategic plan or school vision?
Not really - We give people full choice. We want them to feel empowered. It is interesting when you do that - key themes emerge that actually connect to a lot of our priorities anyway. Themes like wellbeing, trauma, Aboriginal perspectives , play and literacy.
One thing we do is that once everyone has chosen their focus we invite them to consider the relationship between these and your 10 pedagogical practices. Then they form what we call CICs – ‘Connected Inquiry Communities’ - the practices help link people’s interests. The interests have to come first. The teachers have to have agency in all this.
K.As a vehicle for professional learning, this is entirely driven by and within the school itself. And it requires a commitment to time. How have you managed that?
We dedicate regular staff sessions to this. The bare minimum is 2 staff meetings per term where they all reflect on what they are doing and what they are noticing and work with their CIC group. Because it is personal, people will also negotiate times to attend seminars or workshops elsewhere that might connects with their inquiry. We also provide time and encourage them to visit other school so teachers are talking to other teachers with similar interests or expertise in the area they are interested in. We really want to broaden this and have more teachers talking to other teachers in other schools as a way of supporting the inquiry process.
K. Of course, the success of any professional learning should ultimately be gauged according to the impact on the children’s learning. Have you explored this?
Several of the inquiries involve the children directly – teachers (and kids) are gathering data and the whole thing is very transparent and immediate. In some classrooms, the teachers make their own inquiries really visible to the kids and gather and reflect on the data through the year. One of our educators last year was inquiring into the relationship between our school values and her use of picture books in the classroom to increase students understanding of them. She really involved the children in this exploration – they were aware of what she was investigating. Another one of our early career educators was working on an inquiry into the teaching of writing. The kids knew this and she was asking them about what they were noticing about whether they were improving as writers. The way those children could talk about themselves as writers really showed the impact of her research into this field. Other inquiries are less directly involving of the learners – rather more an investigation into something that then becomes the basis for new approaches or refinements to practices later on.
K. Judy Halbert and Linda Kaser, Canadian colleagues with whom I have had the delight of connecting in recent times, are champions of teacher inquiry. There work has a slightly different location/purpose but is still broadly connected to this idea of teachers as inquirers. Their ‘Spirals of Inquiry’ model, developed with NZ’s Helen Timperly is well worth exploring and I think would add a lovely layer to the work you have begun here - perhaps by bumping up the interesting question of impact? Their pivotal questions might be of value to your work too: What is going on for our learners? How do we know? Why does it matter? (from Halbert and Kaser 2017 The Spiral of Inquiry Playbook)
Anyway…, I was so delighted (and jealous) to see the photos of your celebration of professional learning at the end of the year (2020). You took the staff to Birrigai (In Tidbinbilla). Tell me more about that.
We believe that getting off site is really important. It helps us get away from our ‘to do’ list, gives us fresh perspective and gets us focussed. Last year we started at Art centre and finished at the Art centre – this year it was Birrigai. Birrigai is a really special place for us as a school. We know when we are there something special happens. The name Birrigai means ‘the place of laughter’ I tell you, when you are there you feel that. We have taken all the kids there this year. This also connects to our Cultural Integrity work which focusses so much on connection to place AND the other thing we have often spoken about with you – the way the environment nurtures curiosity and is such a natural home for inquiry. We try to get outside – even for staff meetings and it just changes the whole atmosphere.
To conclude the Educator Inquiry Journeys in 2020, we asked the staff to bring artefacts to Birrigai that would help tell the story of their inquiry. They each spent some time alone in this to curate a small ‘exhibit’ in this amazing outdoor space. The staff then spent time quietly walking around this exhibition and learning from each other. It was so creative! One of our LSA’s had inquired into anxiety and she created an exhibit in a thistlebush – prickly and challenging. This whole idea of curation is, we believe, really important to the mindset. The experience was about connecting, curating and contemplating. We walked amongst the artefacts of people’s learning and made connections then walked down the hill to a final celebration. The experience was also connected to the work we have been doing on cultural Integrity -which focusses so much on connection to place AND the other thing we have often spoken about with you – the way the environment nurtures curiosity and is such a natural home for inquiry. We try to get outside, even for staff meetings, and it just changes the whole atmosphere. '
It sounds really beautiful – and such a powerful way to promote reflection. I love that you have used that word ‘contemplation’… we have SO little time to contemplate in schools and surely the work we do would benefit from more of it!
Thinking ahead – what’s in store for 2021? What have you learned this year that you would tweak or change for 2021?
I think we have created a rod for our own backs! We have created beautiful experiences for the last 2 years so, now, how do we sustain that?! How do we keep it fresh? The core won’t change. Each educator will have a question, go through a cycle of inquiry and conclude with some form of sharing – none of that will change. We have started to dabble with the focus on the Future of Education which the department here is talking about and that might help anchor our questions. We are not sure…
One thing that we think could be extended is the opportunity for teachers to share their work with a wider audience. We already have a relationship with the University of Canberra and there would be some teachers who could take their work to a conference or write for a journal which would be a wonderful way to take it further. We have played with the idea of inviting other schools to hear our stories but that would be a second share time. It’s so valuable to have that safe, vulnerable space to share as a staff first. It would be interesting to see how that would impact on them. The staff have also suggested we could make the final sharing something that happened over a longer time frame – a week of sharing perhaps.
K: Like a festival of personal inquiry -you could have kids sharing some of their inquiries too? And maybe even have the kids see the teachers’ artefacts? (at this point we all get a little excited about this idea…) So, If a school wanted to explore this idea – what would be your most important piece of advice?
If you are already using an inquiry-based approach with your students then dive in! Just DO it. And remind people that this is what we have said is good for learning in our classrooms – and it’s good for OUR learning too. And know your people. We have worked really hard on culture building by establishing strong relationships with individuals. We try to take the time to inquire into our people and build those relationships. We try to really listen to them and modify what we do in response. I also think sometimes this kind of work can be overcooked, over complicated and made more complex than it needs to be. When I talk to other schools about their approaches, It can just seem too much. I think this is about learning, as leaders, to release, keep it simple , trust your staff and personalise it for each staff member.
Some teacher reflections:
The challenges that I/we have faced through our inquiries have required us to become more flexible and demonstrate increased levels of grit. This is something we encourage students to do each day and as they delve into inquiries, but don't necessarily experience ourselves.
We need to tap into students passions and provide them with opportunities to explore them, following a range of different pathways.
I feel that Educator Inquiry continues to develop my empathy of how kids feel each and every day and the strategies and supports I can put in place to help support them as they work through the inquiry cycle, particularly in things like iTime.
I like the agency we are offered, to choose professional learning that is right for us. This is particularly helpful as a new educator as the things I would like to learn are not the same as those further along in their career.
