Inquiry with Impact: Where Clarity Meets Collaboration

Strengthen your team’s capacity for data-driven dialogue with a tool built for clarity and coherence.

DR. JEN GOWERS
Instructional Specialist

If you’re a school leader who has dedicated precious team time to the inquiry process, or if you’re a teacher who engages in an inquiry process with your team or with a coach, you know the value of the time spent in inquiry hinges on the effectiveness of your team’s execution.

That said, where’s the gap? It can be hard to find. Do we not have the right strategies to implement for effective instructional change? Do we not have a willingness for peer-to-peer intervisitation that can allow us to see the strategy implemented from many different perspectives? Perhaps yes to both, honestly.

However, first and foremost, the question to ask is, do we have a strong system for team inquiry in the first place? Answering in the affirmative can often start with using a clear, clean team tool to communicate team movement through their inquiry process.

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Team inquiry: an overview

​Whether you trace inquiry-based learning all the way back to John Dewey, or whether you use Data Wise out of Harvard University or the Deming Cycle (PDSA: Plan, Do, Study, Act) out of Bell Laboratories or any of the other wonderful ways into this work, you know that the spirit of inquiry work is placing the opportunity for learning on the learner. In teacher teams, this means teachers themselves guide how to improve instruction through a cycle of looking at student work or data, implementing innovative interventions, and studying the impact. This process — done consistently and repeatedly across departments, subject areas, or even whole school or whole district communities — can powerfully impact and uplift student learning outcomes. 

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Creating & using a team inquiry tool

​Inquiry can enhance and uplift teacher teamwork toward measurable excellence, and yet, it can also fall flat.

One of the main ways I have seen inquiry go awry is through complex, convoluted, or complicated processes that are not understood or used by all teachers. If the spirit of inquiry means teachers are guiding the interventions and innovations, then at minimum, we need a common understanding of the tool and process! 

If your team needs a straightforward way to enact, assess, and plan for inquiry, one way forward is to use this tool, adapted from The Deming Cycle, to: 

• Name your goals. At the outset of your document, state your purposes for the inquiry process or what you’ll be concretely doing.
  • Examples: Analyze the data and synthesize the most important findings (name the skills in need of improvement). Hypothesize about what the struggle may be (from the imagined student perspective). Plan an intervention (from the wisdom of the room of teachers). Uplift student outcomes in the area most in need of improvement. 
• Analyze data + plan, choosing an intervention/strategy to try together. Select a common data set and collaboratively look at how students did overall and by subgroups (for example, language learners and neurodivergent learners). Note the skill where students scored highest, and the skill where students scored lowest. Indicate why you think this might be, given the data set in front of you. Author together as a team what the impact might be if you were able to elevate this skill with young people using a particular strategy or intervention, commonly. This grounds us in the current data and reminds us of what’s possible and why it matters that we succeed, together.
• Try the intervention/strategy and record the outcomes. Each teacher commits to using the strategy in at least three lessons and to indicating the outcome of its use. It’s especially impactful here if you’re able to intervisit one another and complete the impact section for your peer! If not, record for yourself, or ask an administrator or coach to come in and indicate the impact/outcomes they see.
• Assess the cycle. Discuss together as a team, and decide the level of effectiveness you found with the intervention you chose, and determine: 
  • Will we continue the intervention?
  • Will we discontinue the intervention?
  • Will we enhance/advance the intervention?

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​Processing goals, a rationale, a plan for implementation, and an opportunity to assess are the bones of what is needed for strong inquiry, and paring it down like this can really help teacher teams to get to the heart of how to enhance instruction for students.

There are, of course, many layers and impactful additions to make this process even richer and more robust (interviewing students, for instance, to get their perspective on the data or intervention, or surveying students for their experience are just two of many powerful and impactful layers that come to mind). However, starting here and getting clarity about what to do and how to do it can set teacher teams up for lasting impact and success.

Sometimes enhancing inquiry is as straightforward as ensuring your common tool is simple and easy to use — it can make all the difference in clarifying the cycle process, outcomes and next steps for you, your peers, your admin, and your whole school. Here’s to greater clarity and excellence in Inquiry!