Inquiry musings

9.07.11 By Gene Thompson-Grove

As the new school year begins, and I begin my new work with BTR, I have been thinking a lot about inquiry.  For many of us, “inquiry” is what “teachers do all the time” – teaching, noticing students, adjusting practice, and collecting more data.  To some extent, of course, that is true.  For others, it seems, inquiry is more about MCAS scores or attendance data.  Educators look at the data, try to make some sense of it, and then set off on a “cycle of inquiry” – developing an action plan, and seeing what happens, hoping for the best.  To my mind, neither example captures the true power of inquiry. 

The dictionary defines inquiry as: 1) The act of exploration and discovery. 2) To ask questions; to be open to seeing new potentials and possibilities.  Indeed, the act of inquiry involves searching, exploring, studying learning, examining one’s own practice, and discovering and rediscovering new possibilities.  Seeing new possibilities and potentials demands working collaboratively with colleagues, to guard against, in Peter Senge’s words, “counting as ‘real’ the data which confirms what we already believe.”  When inquiry is conducted in the presence of others, it is our colleagues who provide the perspectives and insights we can’t possibly have on our own, because wherever we go, there we are, looking at the world through our own lenses.  And it is this practice of inquiry—undertaken collaboratively, over time, and guided by a powerful question—that can actually change the culture of a school or organization. 

I’ll admit that I used to shy away from anything that looked like inquiry.  I asked myself, “Where will I find the time?  What do I know about data?”  How is it different, really, from what I do naturally as an educator – asking myself questions, reflecting on my practice, paying attention to the challenges of my craft, even going public in my critical friends group and asking my colleagues for feedback?

Then, in 1997, I participated in a collaborative inquiry institute where I learned how to shape a more formal inquiry process, and I was hooked. As a result, I can’t imagine not having a question that guides my thinking, a question that helps me determine what kind of data I need and how to gather it, a question that helps me look at my assumptions and helps me open up to new possibilities.  I am a better educator because I have begun to explore questions about my practice in a systematic way.

To my thinking, it is not data—but the questions which arise from the data—that propel inquiry.  But before the question, I often begin with something else.  It may be a wondering, a sense of “what if?”  Sometimes it is a dilemma, or a critical incident, or data that is jarring, or a sense of not knowing that sets the stage for my inquiry.  At times, I notice that something is working, and decide I need to know why. 

All of this, of course, requires certain dispositions.  It means I must, at times, slow down and be reflective.  I must develop the intellectual side of myself—the place where I can open up to others with curiosity and interest, where I consider options or ideas I hadn’t thought of before.  I have to develop the capacity to identify and explicitly work on the questions that matter most — the questions or aspects of my practice that make me the most uncomfortable.  When I engage in collaborative inquiry, I must get used to being in the place of not knowing more often, and I must have a greater capacity for ambiguity. 

At one point, a teacher in one of my favorite books about inquiry, The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Classroom Research, declares, “had I not posed the question, I never would have noticed what was actually occurring!”  And so, in my new position with BTR, I simultaneously think that I must continue to engage in inquiry, while wondering how I will find the time, or the courage, to slow down and focus on something that has been so central to my practice.  Who, I wonder, will help me frame my question?  Who will stop long enough to exhale, to engage in framing the process with me?  Who else is interested in setting off on a journey to “make the familiar strange?”