Closely tied to critical storytelling and culturally responsive teaching is teacher inquiry. In our podcast episodes, Mary Leoson, Jeffery Buckner-Rodas, and I spend a great deal of time talking about teacher inquiry.
Teacher inquiry is often thought of as simply an educator’s self-investigation into their own teaching methods, a way of examining their own biases, their mistakes, their successes, and the ways in which they can grow through self-reflection. Indeed, this covers the basic tenets of teacher inquiry. As noted by Dana and Yendol-Hoppey, teacher inquiry is, at it’s core, a study of one’s own teaching practices. In their book on teacher inquiry, “The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Classroom Research,” Dana and Yendol-Hoppey note, “They [teachers] do this by posing questions or wonderings, collecting data to gain insights into their wonderings, analyzing the data along with reading relevant literature, making changes in practice based on new understandings developed during inquiry, and sharing findings with others.” In a way, then, teacher inquiry can be closer tied to collaborative pedagogy and reflecting on one’s own work and sharing it with one’s colleagues can lead to even greater insights.
For my project, I found teacher inquiry was so closely tied to both story as pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching, it was imperative to include it in my literature review and on this website. On a personal note, I not only researched teacher inquiry, but I also participated in it. Throughout this project, I reflected on every step, and in taking on the idea of sharing insights and understandings, I brought them to the small group. Jeffery and Mary and I all participated in our own teacher inquiry, but it was our collaborative effort that brought the most change and development to our projects, even the individual parts. In a way, we were not just investigating the components of teacher inquiry and collaborative inquiry, but also living it.
Teacher inquiry offers many benefits to both educators and students and is essential for an educator who is working toward a culturally responsive classroom. In this way, teacher inquiry extends beyond simply understanding one’s own teaching methods and into manifesting social change in the classroom and potentially society. We might even propose that teacher inquiry is a requirement of being an educator and that each teacher has a responsibility to look into their own teacher practices whether through self-reflection, on-going professional development, deeper research into social equity, creative collaboration, or ideally, a combination of all of the above.
Dana and Yendol-Hoppey agree, writing that, “…engaging in inquiry is a responsibility you accept as a teacher that enables you to take a stand and effect educational change. By generating data and evidence to support the decisions and positions you take as an educator, you help reform classrooms and schools, which results in the promotion of social justice.”
Whether an educator sees themself as actively involved in social activism, or they simply want to continually improve their own teaching methods, teacher inquiry, or reflective classroom research is one of the best ways to start. It is an important part of everyone’s educational journey and reflects, by it’s very nature, an atmosphere of lifelong learning. Ongoing self-reflection leads to uncovering one’s biases, developing empathy, and opening one’s mind to the idea of changing teaching practices that might currently feel familiar and comfortable. As Linda Finlay notes, “The point is to recapture practice experiences and mull them over critically in order to gain new understandings and so improve future practice. This is understood as part of the process of life-long learning” (2008). As educators, we want our students to have a passion for education. By engaging in teacher inquiry, we can ignite and cultivate that passion in ourselves.
How to get started:
Other great sources:
Inquiry as Stance by Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle
Teacher-practitioner research inquiry and sense making of their reflections on scaffolded collaborative lesson planning experience by Sally B. Gutierez
At Last: Practitioner Inquiry and the Practice of Teaching: Some Thoughts on Better by Susan L. Lytle
Story-Based Pedagogy 