Why Inquiry?

Our approach to teacher professional learning grew from our own observations and authentic questions. Students often profess to have completed assigned readings, yet say they do not understand the text. Students stumble over words when they read aloud in class. Teachers often feel they must summarize assigned texts for students if the class is to have a meaningful discussion of academic ideas. Why, we wondered, do students seem to have such difficulty reading the texts assigned in their classes? As is so often the case, one question led to another: How do students approach the reading? What do they actu-ally do when they read? And what do we really mean by reading? What are we expecting to see in student performance? Finally, we pondered, Come to think of it, what do we do when we read texts like these?

Pursuing answers to such questions led to the development of the Reading Apprenticeship Framework, based on case study research with students, surveys of the field, and current understandings of language and learning. But this pursuit turned out to have another important benefit: teachers who engaged in these inquiries into their own and their students’ reading processes learned a great deal about the nature of literacy, about the complexities of academic texts, about themselves as readers, about the discipline‐specific nature of their own literacy practices, and about their students as literacy learners. They replaced long‐held misconceptions about reading as a simple skill with the recognition that reading is a complex endeavor. These teachers came to see that despite their students’ inexperience doing highly sophisticated academic work, these same students could do this level of work when given the right support.

By exploring reading and thinking processes that support their own and student reading, by experiencing specific pedagogies that facilitate their own work with complex texts and tasks, and then by trying these pedagogies out in their classroom instruction, teachers came to see both the utility and limits of these moves and strategies for their students. They exercised new professional judgment and developed confidence in their own capacity to make instructional decisions, try new strategies, and solve problems as needed to address implementation challenges.

This wasn’t a surprise. After all, a great deal has been written about the value of teacher action research for renewing instructional practice and teacher effectiveness.⁴ Leaders in teacher education have long promoted an inquiry stance toward teaching, with teachers learning in and from practice by documenting and reflecting on their work and the responses of their students.⁵ We share these values but also know that teachers have many demands on their time and attention. Pursuing one’s own questions about instruction can lead to great insights, but the path may necessarily meander. In reality, very few teachers have the luxury of generating their own research projects, given the press of their many responsibilities. Yet we believe all teachers, indeed all learners, can benefit from opportunities to reflect and inquire.

By definition, inquiry cannot be passive. It is an active, intentional process animated by questions and observations. The inquirer actively engages in constructing new understandings by building theories, finding patterns, and making meaning. Inquiry experiences are therefore potentially transformative in their impact on knowledge and practices. And so, we wondered, Could we distill what we had learned and experienced about effective inquiries to make teacher learning opportunities as focused and efficient as possible yet still retain the active, inquiry experience of exploring and asking authentic questions in the company of others, similarly engaged?

Inevitably, professional development provides a model of instruction, and often a poor one, with delivery of specific strategies and information taking center stage.⁶ With this in mind, we designed inquiries to embed the pedagogies we hoped teachers would enact in their classrooms (especially regarding group-ing, integrated strategy instruction, inquiry practices, and discussion protocols). Engaging in inquiries would therefore provide teachers with an experiential knowledge base of literacy routines and strategies, as well as a set of tools that would support them to implement these practices. Over time, such ongoing inquiry would develop teachers’ adaptive expertise, allowing them to solve problems and implement routines flexibly.⁷ This experiential, instructional tool kit, situated in ongoing inquiry activities and explorations, would meet teachers’ needs for concrete and practical solutions to the everyday problem of students’ limited comprehension of course texts. The collaborative inquiry, by its nature, would invite teachers to reflect on and critique particular instructional techniques and to adapt them to teaching and their own students.⁸

Principles for Team Inquiry

When teams take time up front to acknowledge the social and personal dimensions of their work together, they set a foundation for their future shared learning. In anticipation of this work, we offer a set of principles based on our experience and the experience of colleagues on campuses across the country who have contributed to this approach to professional learning. (See Team Tool 4.4, Principles for Team Inquiry.) These principles, meant to evolve as they are used in local settings, support teachers’ capacity to teach disciplinary reading in response to student thinking. They help teachers keep the goal of expanding students’ abilities for disciplined, creative, and critical thinking in the forefront of their work.

These four principles can help teams make effective use of their time together:

• Take one another’s convictions (about the role of reading in your classroom, about students, about best ways to help students gain conceptual understanding in their discipline) as a starting point for inquiry and learning, rather than as a given.
• Engage one another in rigorous reading and metacognitive conversations about reading within and across academic disciplines.
• Practice multiple inquiry activities designed to build one another’s capacities for high‐quality, responsive teaching.
• Be conscious as a team of experiencing the same approaches promoted in the Reading Apprentice-ship Framework for helping students to become engaged and strategic readers and learners.

4. Altrichter, H., Feldman, A., Posch, P., & Somekh, B. (2013). Teachers investigate their work: An introduction to action research across the professions. New York: Routledge. Cochran‐Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (1999). The teacher research movement: A decade later. Educational Researcher, 28(7), 15–25.
   McNiff, J. (2013). Action research: Principles and practice. New York: Routledge.
   Somekh, B. (2010). The Collaborative Action Research Network: 30 years of agency in devel-oping educational action research. Educational Action Research, 18(1), 103–121.
5. Anderson, G. L., & Herr, K. (2011). Scaling up “evidence‐based” practices for teachers is a profitable but discredited paradigm. Educational Researcher, 40(6), 287–289.
   Cochran‐Smith, M., & S. Lytle (1996). Communities for teacher research: Fringe or forefront. In Teacher learning: New policies, new practices, M. McLaughlin & I. Oberman (Eds.), 92–112. New York: Teachers College Press.
   Schon, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.
   Stenhouse, L. (1981). What counts as research? British Journal of Educational Studies, 29(2), 103–14.
6. Anderson, G. L., & Herr, K. (2011). Scaling up “evidence‐based” practices (see note 5).
   Lefstein, A. (2008). Changing classroom practice through the English National Literacy Strategy: A micro‐interactional perspective. American Educational Research Journal, 45(3), 701–737.
7. Bransford, J., Derry, S., Berliner, D., & Hammerness, K. (2005). Theories of learning and their role in teaching. In L. Darling‐Hammond & J. Bransford (Eds.), Preparing teachers for a changing world (pp. 40–87). San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass.
   Lai, M. K., McNaughton, S., Amituanai‐Toloa, M., Turner, R., & Hsiao, S. (2009). Sustained acceleration of achievement (see note 3).
   Lampert, M., Franke, M. L., Kazemi, E., Ghousseini, H., Turrou, A. C., Beasley, H., et al. (2013) Keeping it complex (see note 2).
8. Gutiérrez, K. D., & Penuel, W. R. (2014). Relevance to practice as a criterion for rigor. Educational Researcher, 43(1), 19–23.
   Penuel, W. R., Fishman, B. J., Haugan Cheng, B., & Sabelli, N. (2011). Organizing Research and Development at the Intersection of Learning, Implementation, and Design. Educational Researcher, 40(7), 331–337.
   Penuel, W. R., Fishman, B. J., Yamaguchi, R., & Gallagher, L. P. (2007). What makes professional development effective? (see note 3).

From Leading for Literacy, pages 50-52 and 77-78