As districts look for ways to promote adult
learning across different sectors of their organization, some districts will
use inquiry teams to promote learning by teachers and administrators. Inquiry
teams come in all forms, shapes, and sizes and sometimes it is not clear which
structures to use within which context. For the purposes of this post, I define
inquiry teams as a group of people within an organization using a cycle of
inquiry to explore a critical problem in education.
One study by Stanford Professor Claude
Goldenberg and his colleagues explore the impact of “school-based inquiry
teams” on a variety of outcomes including student achievement. This study
provides some tools that could be useful for districts and schools that already
use or are planning to use inquiry teams as a structure for increasing adult
learning.
Galimore, Ermeling, Saunders, and
Goldenberg[i]
describe their study of 15 Title I schools serving 14,000 mostly low achieving,
English learners. All 15 schools were
required by their district to select a school improvement model. Nine of those schools chose the study
framework centered on the use of “school-based inquiry teams”(which I’ll
describe in a minute) and the other six comparison schools chose other
frameworks (thereby selecting from a district approved list). After two phases
of the study comprising five years, Galimore, et al. found the nine schools
using their improvement model significantly outperformed the comparison schools
on the Stanford 9 assessment.
The framework used in the school-based
inquiry teams in Galimore, et al.’s study had four elements:
1.
Goals that
are set and shared;
2.
Meaningful indicators that measure progress;
3.
Assistance by capable others from within and outside the school;
4.
Distributed leadership that supports and pressures goal attainment.
Galimore,
et al. found four operational features critical for teachers to sustain in
their school-based inquiry groups:
1. Job-alike teams: teams need
to have a common task relevant to each teacher’s own classroom.
2. Trained peer facilitator:
each team needs a point person who is identified and trained to guide their
colleagues through the inquiry process.
3. Inquiry focused protocols (described
below)
4. Stable settings: the ability to conserve as few as 20 hours a year
for teacher inquiry.
Saunders, Goldenberg, and Gallimore[ii]
describe the specific inquiry focused protocols used in this study described
above (although detailed in a separate article). The protocol the school-based inquiry teams used was:
1.
Identify and
clarify specific and common student needs to work on together.
2.
Formulate a clear
objective for each common need and analyze related student work.
3.
Identify and adopt
a promising instructional focus to address each common need.
4.
Plan and complete
necessary preparation to try the instructional focus in the classroom.
5.
Try the team’s
instructional focus in the classroom.
6.
Analyze student
work to see if the objective is being met and evaluate the instruction.
7.
Reassess: Continue
and repeat cycle or move on to another area of need.
These school-based inquiry teams have
traits that many other teams focused on inquiry might already be using or consider
adopting. For schools or districts that reserve time for on-going grade level
planning or department planning this framework and protocol could be helpful
for thinking of important elements to add to their cycle of inquiry. As organizations in education begin to
promote a continuous cycles of learning for adults (as well as children), they
will look to studies like this to provide guidance.
[i]
Gallimore, R., Ermeling,
B.A., Saunders, W.M., & Goldenberg, C. (May, 2009, in press). Moving the
Learning of Teaching Closer to Practice: Teacher Education Implications of
School-based Inquiry Teams. Elementary School Journal (special issue).
[ii]
Saunders, W. M., Goldenberg, C.N.,
& Gallimore, R. (2009). "Increasing Achievement by Focusing
Grade-Level Teams on Improving Classroom Learning: A Prospective,
Quasi-Experimental Study of Title I Schools" American Educational Research
Journal. 46, No. 4, 1006-1033.
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