Learning in tandem: professional development for teachers and students as inquirers

Abstract

This study explores the first year of a grant-funded professional development program that utilized collaborative inquiry to develop teachers’ capacities to enact inquiry learning with secondary students in a variety of content areas. Guided by a vision of inquiry as a complex endeavor, located along a continuum of decisions about authentic disciplinary tasks and student autonomy, as well as a situated view of teacher learning, researchers examined surveys, reflective writing and teacher work samples to explore the relationship between developing capacity for both student and teacher inquiry. Teachers reported satisfaction with their learning about teacher and student inquiry while exhibiting capacity at mostly beginning levels. Ultimately, these results led to discussion of the practical and conceptual dilemmas for facilitating teacher learning when the two inquiry processes for teachers and students are developed in tandem. While conceptual shifts in planning and assessment were noted, practical capacities of both were limited. Most teachers, however, evidenced interest in inquiry for engagement and no shift in embracing more self-directed views of their own learning in spite of professional development interventions.

Keywords:

• inquiry learning
• professional development
• collaborative inquiry
• reflective practice
• teacher learning
• school partnerships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This one-year grant was later renewed for multiple years.

2. Sc1 identifies the science teacher participant and the data source. See Table 2.

3. Table 2 documents 18 submitted project proposals among 23 participants. Of those, three were determined to not involve inquiry. Of the remaining 15 projects, only 14 were considered to be fully documented because 1 teacher did not submit year-end documentation. In evaluating the results of inquiry, these 14 projects were used for the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

The professional development program reported in this article was funded through the Teacher Leader Quality Partnership grant in New York State from the New York State Education Department. Grant funds did not support the research or writing of this article