Inquiring into our Practice at Secondary
This year, secondary schools are engaging in professional inquiry questions that help educators learn about the inquiry cycle and experience strategies that they can use in their classrooms with students. Teacher inquiries focus on the five key underpinnings of inquiry: questioning and curiosity, engagement, student agency, assessment and evidencing, and competency development. Keeping true to our triple-track agenda, where we model and experience what we want for our students, teachers exercised their agency by selecting which underpinning they wished to focus on. Teams were then formed within schools around areas of interest instead of departments. Similarly, secondary administrators are participating in a guided inquiry where they have developed questions that support the work that they are doing with their staff thereby growing in their learning of inquiry as well.
As a way to support this process, we have brought in Trevor Mackenzie, author of Dive into Inquiry, to help guide us. His five visits during our SLOs (Staff Learning Opportunities) this year will provide us with ongoing support while we build our experience and learn strategies, such as the Question Formulation Technique and the Spiral of Inquiry, to teach inquiry in our classrooms.
Through ongoing collaboration with Trevor, the Curriculum Department provides additional support in the form of professional development opportunities, meeting with teachers to support their questions, and guiding Department Head discussions. As well, teachers can access bi-weekly newsletters with strategies to support inquiry, 1-5-15+ Bite-sized Pro-D monthly publications focused on the five underpinnings, and updated inquiry resources being added to the Secondary Support pages on the Curriculum website (curriculum.abbyschools.ca/resources).
This is an exciting time to be in secondary schools where we are all moving in the same direction, working to make our schools more equitable and engaging through the inquiry process.