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Lecture 2: Spirals of Inquiry: Scanning and Focussing
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From the course by Commonwealth Education Trust
Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Planning for Teaching and Learning
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Commonwealth Education Trust
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From the lesson
Spirals of Inquiry for Planning and Teaching
Week four follows the pattern we have set in the first three weeks. This week we explore how you can inform and deepen your planning for teaching and learning by engaging in a specific inquiry cycle. All of the lectures this week focus on the various phases or stages of the spiral of inquiry. The spiral of inquiry asks us to start with the experiences of our learners and to continually ask ourselves these questions: What’s going on for our learners? How do we know? Why does it matter?
Meet the Instructors
Dr Judy HalbertCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Vancouver Island University, British Columbia, Canada
Dr Linda KaserCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Vancouver Island University, British Columbia, Canada
Professor John MacBeathProfessor Emeritus
University of Cambridge, UK
[MUSIC]
Welcome back.
During the last lecture, we had a chance to look at the Spiral of Inquiry framework
as a whole, with its six phases. We discussed that in a brief form
and now what we're going to do in this period of time
is we're going to look at the first two stages because we think this is how we -
although, the stages can be moved in various directions -
we think these first two stages are critically important.
So, we're going to build an understanding of what scanning looks like,
what it is and what it isn't
and also then we're going to take our energies
and think, how do we focus on something substantive
that will make a difference over the next year to the learning lives
of the young people that we're working with?
So, let's jump right in to the first stage,
while we pay attention to the three questions that are on the screen too,
because this always disciplines our thinking.
What's going on for our learners - the young people that we're working with?
How do we know that that's going on?
And, why does this matter?
So, it's a focus, some evidence and some understanding of why
this might be particularly important for us to understand.
Scanning: what's going on for our learners?
What's important here? Well, scanning involves
inquiry and evidence seeking mindsets.
We're looking broadly. It's not about seeking evidence for things
as they have been, or the status quo.
We're not starting the scanning process by saying
something very narrow focused,
form and writing, we're trying to have a whole rounded picture.
Remember the Treasures Within, and the notion of learners being more
connected to a natural world - this is all part of scanning.
It takes a wide perspective, and it's not-- we're not just looking at
the things that are easy to measure,
whether things come through test scores, or office referrals.
"Broad" is the key word to think about in scanning.
Scanning is also about-- it's not just about what's happening for our learners,
but the scanning process is a wonderful to make sure that we are
broadly engaged with our families -
we know in some countries of the world that the families for young people
might be mainly grandparents, or maybe a single grandparent,
because of illness or life circumstances -
and it's not just about our perspective, as the professionals,
that's part of the breadth of the scanning phase.
We think it's an important phase.
We think it's important, also, though to put some time frames around it.
We've seen appreciative inquiry in whole communities work in really,
very powerful ways to transform the learning of young people.
When a whole community stands together to say,
you know, what is going on for our young people?
Are they intellectually engaged? Are they socially engaged?
And are they mastering enough of the academic tasks that they need
to get to the next level of accomplishment
to allow them a future? And that's important to us as Western Canadians.
So, here are some of the questions that you might consider during the scanning phase.
If it's a whole school or community, we think this phase shouldn't take
longer than three months because you can scan for too long,
and stay at that level of abstraction where you never get to the action,
but we also think it's a real mistake to short-change
this part of the action.
So, here are some questions that our schools
and our educators, and we ourselves ask ourselves.
Do learners have the opportunities to express themselves in a variety of ways?
And I mentioned before, I've always been interested in
helping young people become more powerful writers.
When I started my career, writing a blog wasn't something that was on the scene,
and now in many, many of our schools, both professionals and young people
are working to learn how to write a really good blog post.
Well, that's one way.
Other learners are learning how to make really strong digital videos,
that make a point and that's another way.
So, broadly, rather than looking at just one aspect of, let's say, writing or reading,
we're trying to say, are there ways that young people can express themselves,
and do they have a repertoire, a broad repertoire,
as you hopefully will in your ePortfolios.
Are learners able to describe in their own words
what they're learning and why it is important?
That's where, we think, the four questions -
the social and emotional questions, and the what are you learning questions -
come into play as part of your scanning
because if you interview, as we often do, three or four learners
at random in a school setting, and if you're disappointed
that they actually can't identify anything they're learning
or anything they are interested in learning,
that's very important diagnostic information
that speaks to intellectual engagement and for us, as Canadians,
we know about 50% of our secondary students report
that they are not engaged intellectually, that's an important finding.
We need to pay attention to it.
We need to test it out in our settings.
I think it was Judy who mentioned-- or perhaps it was in a conversation
over dinner last night with the videographers and our faculty
cohorts, we're Judy was talking a nautical understanding course
that has been built in one of our secondary schools that's in a coastal community,
we're pretty sure that because of the thoughtful way that the staff
has gone about creating that course,
that the thirty learners who are going to spend some of their time
out on the ocean, getting first hand understanding of how the ocean works
and what they need to learn about marine life,
that they're going to be engaged.
However, the test is can they say what they're learning and why it matters?
Do learners see and understand the connections across content areas and disciplines?
We think that's important, we really think it's important that we don't
lose the power of disciplines, but we live in a much more interconnected world,
and we want to make those links and see if our learners are making those links.
Here's a few more.
Are our learners engaged in high quality co-operative learning?
Can they really explore ideas and work together
in powerful ways? That is a competency that many of us
have always valued, but it is increasingly important
because the big challenges that we face as a global society
require teamwork, across roles and across countries
and we need to have the skills,
as adults we need to have a high level of collaborative skill
and we have to develop those competencies with young people too.
So, if you notice that learners in your environment
aren't able to work together or they're only able to work with, you know,
the people who are exactly like them, either from age or from background,
that's not the kind of world we think that we want to create,
we want to create one where diversity is valuede
and people can work together with their own perspectives.
So, that's also a part of learning,
to work effectively with others, not just to form those groups,
but to actually get something done.
And we're very interested in multi-generational learners,
not just young students learning from older students
and from adults, but the reverse -
one of our favourite examples is a group of five year olds
who have expertise in doing learning circles
from an aboriginal perspective,
and those five year olds have been developed by their teacher, Susan,
to move through the school and teach all of the older students
that protocol and to model it and to teach them what it means
to both tell your story and then to be listened to in depth,
in that two, three rounds of circle listening.
We think that's a powerful way of being in the world
and we like to find those examples and create video so we can all learn from it.
And then, are learners confident in receiving and using feedback?
Young people, we know from the self-regulated model
and from the mindset work,
if we can't take feedback and use it to shape our learning,
then we're not going to be life-long learners,
we're just going to be people who are more into
performing for certain tangible rewards in the short-term
and we know-- we have enough knowledge now that
that's not going to last people a lifetime to do
the kinds of things in the world that need to be done.
So, that's an important stage of the Spiral of Inquiry.
The next part that we want to talk about is
the focusing stage because as we said, you can't--
you don't have the luxury of scanning for everyone,
ask them powerful, well-rounded and well-grounded questions
and then look for evidence, particularly
- as we've said in our culture - about intellectual engagement.
But then you've got to come to that place of decision -
where are we going to put our collective attention?
You notice that we're very keen on working as a team.
So, what is the focusing stage? What does it involve?
And what is it not?
So that we have a bit of concept attainment, here.
Well, focusing uses information from the scanning process
to begin to clarify where we need to put our energies.
What should we invest ourselves in most powerfully?
It might be a completely new idea, but it also might be
building from an appreciative perspective on something that you're doing,
maybe not collectively, but there's somebody who is doing well,
one of those ideas that we've learned from the health field where
you know, positive deviance, somebody doing something really well
but doing it alone and we don't know about it,
can be built into the collective life of the schools and our classrooms.
Focusing also usually requires a collection of further information
to clarify what is happening.
So, sometimes as teachers we tend to say, you know, "All the kids are disengaged"
or, "None of them are getting enough sleep anymore"
and we're trying to discipline ourselves at this stage to not assume,
to say "How do we know? Is it everybody?" and "Does it matter?"
Often it does, but we need to test some of our assumptions
and see to what degree what we think we might focus on is a reality for
most learners in the school.
We also have seen an enormous power in the focusing stage
of those schools and districts and jurisdictions that have taken a positive
approach and used emerging strengths to say, "You know what?
This is something that we could be exceptional-- we could really be
amongst the best in the world at this particular thing -
why don't we take that strength, build our self-confidence
and use that to form an identity around our learning environment?"
It might be art, it might be music, it might be drumming, it might be writing,
it might be maths problem solving, it might be scientific understanding of the marine ecology
which is important to us in our province.
But, don't think of focusing as just "What's the thing we're worst at?
Let's plug that hole and we can't possibly move on
until we've done that." There are a lot of ways
of moving forward at the focusing stage.
Here are the kinds of questions that our teams of teachers who are planning
together ask themselves. They ask themselves, "What kind of popped out
as a major theme when we were scanning?
And what evidence have we brought to thinking about that?
What are some strengths that our learners show in this area?
And how can we use that as part of our focus?"
In action research, often we have asked people to pose their focus as a question.
Helen said - and we had interesting dialogue about this -
that she didn't notice that the schools that were making the greatest gains
over time necessarily were posing their focus as a question,
they simply agreed that this is what they were going to focus on,
it might have been more like a title or a topic,
and that sometimes slowing the process down, the focusing process down,
to say, "Let's get the perfectly worded question" - which can be helpful
when we're doing graduate work - wasn't part of the intellectual scene.
So, that's been interesting for us to think about,
that simply taking a focus and making sure the energy is
moving in that direction and that we're alive to the other stages
of the process - because of course later on we are going to want to check
whether we made enough of a difference -
it will be interesting to see what you find as you explore the spiral,
whether your formulating it as a question makes a difference.
So, we would say in the focusing stage, what can you do
more of, more often, that is powerful, that you think your learners need?
What's going to make the biggest difference with a group of learners
that you face? We're hoping that you're working in a collaborative school,
where you can tackle this with other teachers.
What can you take on over the next three months, or four months, or a year?
I find that the time span that we have in our minds is important
and as teachers often we think about a single year
as an important phase. Scanning, focusing - these are really important stages.
In the next lecture, Judy will talk with you about the next two stages
of the Spiral of Inquiry. So, she will be exploring with you,
and we hope you'll find this really interesting,
the process of developing some hunches about what might be going on
and what might be a useful focus,
and then, not an in-depth, but certainly a succinct view
of the kinds of new professional learning that we need to
place in our spiral to make sure we're really getting the outcomes for young people
that we want and that they deserve.
[MUSIC]
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