Teaching as Inquiry

With the shift in PL to more of a structured Teaching as Inquiry model, I am interested in different models in different school. A colleague shared a great resource where St Pats Silverstream share their story about PLG's and teaching as inquiry.

Link to TKI site: http://assessment.tki.org.nz/Assessment-in-the-classroom/Teaching-as-inquiry/St-Patrick-s-College-Silverstream-case-study

I watched a few of the videos - the one on Collegial Teaching (link) was really good.

Sent an email in response to the sharing:

the story of St Pat's is particularly interesting and shows this model will work. The Head of English summed it up well in the video on Collegial Teacher Learning (from 3:15 onwards):

One bit of advice for a school sort of toying with the idea of doing it this way, I would say whatever it is you look at, whatever your research be, make it practical and useful for you as a teacher. Because if you don’t do that, you’re just wasting time, you’re doing it for the sake of doing it. Whereas if you say to yourself, what is it I really want to know, what do I want to find out about my class, about my teaching practice, about my department? Pick something that you know is of intrinsic value to yourself, and then anything else you do after that is just going to be a bonus.

This might be a good starter when you all begin to meet with your groups. Another useful snippet from the Ed Gazette article was:

"Teacher inquiry is not necessarily a response to the hard data that may be showing low achievement results. Sometimes, it is simply to address issues of participation, or engagement."

The real challenge for us all is leading this change. As the Ed Gazette article concludes:   "It is school leaders who are able to to foster a culture of inquiry across the school and provide the space, time, and mentorship for teachers to inquire and reflect on their practice and be able to make changes."

We all have 'Lead' in our flash new job titles (Within School Lead Teacher, Across School Lead Teacher). We do have the time and space - just need to provide the mentorship...

Another option for sharing these type of discussion could be the TBC PL Google+ community ( http://goo.gl/EwwPef). Rather than just sharing resources we can get this type of discussion out of our inboxes and into the open with other staff.

Cheers

Andrew

I'm looking forward to see how it unfolds here at TBC.