To learn how to improve their teaching, each teacher needs to investigate the impact of teaching practices on student learning in his or her context — the core of Teaching as Inquiry. Teachers involved in inquiry report that it is a highly satisfying and energising form of professional development which supports their self-reflection and critical examination of practice, and encourages them to try new challenges and explore different ways of teaching.
In the New Zealand Curriculum, the teaching as inquiry process is divided into three related investigations:. Timperley, Kaser and Halbert outline a useful expanded model, the spiral of inquiry, which extends the focusing, teaching and learning phases to include six phases:.
Key question: What is happening for students in your classroom? Scanning is about getting an overview of the whole group of students — their areas of strength and need.
This should be broad, not just focused on easily measured academic outcomes. It should also include student behaviour, engagement, learning dispositions and teacher practice. Evidence collection also involves getting the perspectives of learners, families and communities. Scanning establishes a foundation for your future learning and teaching.
It helps you become aware of a range of impressions, opportunities, and challenges relevant to your teaching. Take time. Get an overview, not perfect coverage. Expect the process of scanning in the first cycle of inquiry to take about two months. Key question: Where should you concentrate your energies in order to change the experiences and outcomes of your learners?
Focusing is about establishing the priority for improvement. The focusing phase narrows and hones the area of investigation. It involves breaking down larger issues into something more workable, and explores close-up questions that offer additional insights. Interrogate your evidence. An outcome of the focusing phase might be a working map of the elements that comprise the area that needs improving, and identifying pathways toward potential approaches to trial.
You should now have a good idea of what you want to focus your ongoing inquiry on and what it might involve. Key question: How is my teaching contributing to this situation? In this phase you reflect upon how your teaching practices have contributed to student learning in the area you have identified as a potential focus for improving. Framing your theories and beliefs as hunches enables you to subject them to scrutiny. Hunches are an opportunity for you to put your teaching intuition into play, based on your observations and experiences with this group of students.
The aim of this phase of the inquiry is to generate a plausible theory about how particular teaching practices current or desired influence learning and outcomes, with which you can structure the rest of the inquiry. You need to test your hunches by seeking evidence and determining which hunches are most accurate. The hunches you develop usually fall into one of five categories. Use this list to develop hunches to explain what you have found out. Key question : How can I learn more about what to actions to take?
In this phase, you plan how you can deepen your professional learning in order to bring about the changes in student learning you identified earlier, and how to translate what you learn into practice. You may revisit your hunches as your growing knowledge enables you to construct more hunches and theories to test during the course of your inquiry.
Key question: What will you do differently to make enough of a difference? Taking action involves learning more deeply about new ways of teaching by exploring different teaching strategies in action, informed by a thorough understanding of why they might be effective in your teaching context.
Taking action is a much more informed and critical process than simply implementing new strategies or trying out innovative or exciting ideas suggested by research or teaching colleagues.
It also takes account of contextual knowledge, and complex relationships between teaching and learning, as well as student voices in decision making. No matter strong the support or evidence is in another context, every idea and strategy needs to be tried out and evaluated for your students. Deep learning occurs when we try something out in action, reflect on how it went, discuss it with others and get their perspectives, and then try it out again.
In this inquiry model, taking action occurs after much reflection on your students and your own teaching actions and beliefs, and after carefully considered learning, so it prevents you jumping in too quickly with ill-considered ideas, which are usually followed by disillusion and desire to give up further attempts. Create an evidence-gathering tool by listing the elements important to your inquiry.
Then use peer or video observation to measure the extent each element is present in every lesson. This provides a foundation for readily sharable experiences, grounded in evidence, as the focus for teacher discussion. It might also be used as a self-checking tool while observing a video recording of your practice. This phase involves you checking the effectiveness of the actions you took in the taking action phase, by assessing the impact on students and their learning.
This will inform where your inquiry might go next. This is a crucial phase. In the scanning and focusing phases you will have already made decisions about the methods and evidence you will need in order to check the impact of your inquiry. The checking phase enables you to determine what inquiry comes next. It is not the last phase of your inquiry, but a bridge between this part of the inquiry and the next part of the learning cycle. It also brings intellectual discipline to your inquiry as you systematically analyse data and other information to discover which strategies have been successful and how they might be improved.
Clarify what counts as success. Determine methods and timeframes. Centre for Education, Statistics and Evaluation. Ministry of Education. Understanding teaching as inquiry. New Zealand Curriculum Update 12 Wellington, NZ: Learning Media.
Sinnema, C. Teaching as inquiry. In Fraser, D. The professional practice of teaching in New Zealand pp. Melbourne, Australia: Cengage Learning. Te kete ipurangi. Inquiry and the key competencies. Timperley, H. A framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry Seminar Series Paper Melbourne, Australia: Centre for Strategic Education. Graeme co-developed the Teaching as Inquiry model that underpins the pedagogical approach of the New Zealand Curriculum and is the co-author of the Best Evidence Synthesis for Social Sciences.
Become a supporter. Thanks for visiting our site. We provide all our resources for FREE. To enable us to continue our work, please take a minute to register. The Educational Hub Bridging the gap between research and practice in education. Sign in. Forgot your password? Get help. Privacy Policy.
Create an account. Password recovery. About The Education Hub. School Resources. Home learning support resources here. Find out how to use these resources here. Check out our ECE webinar schedule here. How to undertake Teaching as Inquiry. Home Insight.
What is Teaching as Inquiry? Inquiry occurs when teachers: turn intuitive judgements about teaching and learning into more structured investigations systematically and consistently examine the relationship between their actions and what learning is happening for the students make good use of evidence and research in order to stimulate new ways of thinking about teaching and learning try out new ideas and evaluate the impact of these changes to practice.
Why Teaching as Inquiry? A spiral model for inquiry In the New Zealand Curriculum, the teaching as inquiry process is divided into three related investigations: focusing inquiry teaching inquiry learning inquiry. Timperley, Kaser and Halbert outline a useful expanded model, the spiral of inquiry, which extends the focusing, teaching and learning phases to include six phases: scanning focusing developing a hunch professional learning taking action checking Spiral of Inquiry developed by Timperley, Kaser and Halbert SCANNING Key question: What is happening for students in your classroom?
Why do it Scanning establishes a foundation for your future learning and teaching. How to do it Question Develop an inquiry mindset. Be curious about learners and their learning. Get started. Scans may be imperfect initially, but the key is curiosity and an inquiring frame of mind.
Investigate Seek evidence. Aim to understand where students are in their learning, alongside the desirable outcomes at their level in national and school-level curricula. It is best to use curriculum-related assessment information rather than normative achievement. Try to describe student learning as accurately as possible. Include diverse areas of learning such as the arts, physical activity, and socio-emotional learning.
Informal assessment can be just as important as formal assessment. Inquiry is the very foundation of what learning is all about—having a burning question and a thirst to find the answer. It is natural learning. I know you have many questions right now like these, right? There are many misunderstandings and misconceptions about inquiry and how inquiry differs from direct instruction that has created unnecessary barriers of entry for many teachers.
The Global Concept is referred to by different names in different curricula. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the schools I work with, I find we churn through the curriculum so fast and collect so much rich evidence that we are miles ahead of where other schools are. The Wabisabi Inquiry Process is the secret sauce we use to make the inquiry sandwich.
When I unpack curriculum, no matter which curriculum it is Common Core, Australian Curriculum, British Curriculum, Indian Curriculum, IB Curriculum , every standard usually fits and can be addressed through one or more of these four categories:.
These are mostly content or concept-related; they are things that our learners are expected to know. A connection is the synthesis of ideas and information to gain new insights and understandings.
Because this is also about connecting to the learning context, it is one of the most significant advantages of inquiry. It's about bringing the concepts and content of the curriculum into the world of the learner. The third element is present in every subject area.
Often these are things that are assessed to demonstrate learning, so the curriculum is full of them. So why do we create all those reports and writing and experiments and graphs? We create products to communicate our essential understandings which are the intended outcomes of the curriculum. When we put it all together, it is our line of inquiry which is really our overview, and it becomes crystal clear firstly why we are doing this unit, and what we want it to achieve.
This is precisely how we tie inquiry to the curriculum. Learners are inspired to be curious about peaceful and inclusive societies and connect examples of integrity in leadership to communicate how leaders have the potential to influence others by creating a shared understanding or charter of global citizenship.
Can you imagine stumbling upon a scene directly out of a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, right here on Earth today? Those who work in this area salvage parts for what amounts to only dollars a day.
In many cases, students who should be in school are working in Agbogbloshie. Environmental concerns include fluorocarbon emissions, as well as lead, mercury, and hydrogen cyanide poisoning seeping into the soil in and around the dumping ground. Many of the workers admit to using marijuana as a deterrent to the headaches and chest pains they experience due to the toxicity of the environment.
According to the report Agbogbloshie by ACT Mask, a respirator manufacturer that launched an air pollution awareness campaign in Accra's low-income areas months before releasing the report, the situation has not markedly improved even after over 20 years. How does stealing another's intellectual property impact the integrity of our entertainment industry? According to the writer, Joanne Seiff, who is also a published author, this is far from the truth. Joanne begins by explaining that most artists and writers are not able to support themselves with the royalty payments from their work.
In a particularly sobering moment in the article, she goes on to clarify just how her publishers calculate costs and royalties. That means that digital piracy does something far more harmful than cost artists money— it actually robs creative ideas of their value. Getting duped by fake news is one of the inherent risks of consuming information on the Internet. Why is being able to spot fake news so important? It comes down to using Information Fluency correctly.
News informs and affects us, and shapes our opinions about the world and what happens in it. We should be able to expect it to be trustworthy. How can our charitable actions both help and inspire others? This former middle school teacher first discovered the homelessness in the inner city schools, and it became a large concern for him.
He wondered what he could do to help the homeless in his area, who often went days without food during the winter. So he packed a row of freezers into his apartment, and began making sandwiches. It was the beginning of great things.
He sleeps roughly two hours a night, and always in the back of his van. Now heading a fully-staffed and growing volunteer organization called The Sandwich Project , Allan receives donations from schools, churches, businesses, and the general public. Through his organization, he routinely delivers hundreds of thousands of sandwiches, blankets, socks, and mittens to the homeless in his city every year.
What are the benefits of bringing mindfulness and meditation practice into a classroom setting? Many educators are introducing meditation into classrooms to improve attention and emotional regulation , with pretty spectacular results.
0コメント