This is a fascinating glimpse into how you are positioning the systematic and progressive development of engaged and empowered inquirers over the course of six years, which lays a strong foundation for secondary school, and this is exactly the kind of deep thinking combined with visionary planning that we need.
Your emphasis on questioning in all Years reminds me of the following two quotations, which, if kept clearly in mind, guide us well in our work with our students:
Being given permission to have/ ask questions, and then being willing and increasingly able to explore answers to the most fruitful of those questions, is essential for learning, and is the work of a lifetime.
To clarify, students in Years 1-6 have one 50-minute library lesson every 2 weeks? Is this for the whole academic year? Have they started yet? Have you given any thought yet to what the respective culminating products in Express might be, given the rich possibilities that you have created?
I am looking forward to an opportunity to discuss this in greater detail.
Thanks for separating the topics, Jannath – I was going to suggest that.
Thoughts on your initial post:
This leads to thoughts on your second post:
Perhaps the most versatile graphic organiser, given the points above, will be some form of the Investigative Journal, which we have adapted for use in primary and secondary (both versions available in Resources), and I include an example below from our Year 9 Signature Work inquiry:
This could be easily simplified and, clearly, there are a range of skills implicit in this example, such as having been able to find the information that I am now working with.
We have chosen APA to base our referencing style on, mainly because at a school level it is essentially the same as Harvard (which is very common), it is simpler than MLA, it is available in Word (which we use in school), and it is the standard style we use for HPQ (Year 10) and EPQ (Year 12/13). This is how it is currently worded in our draft Academic Integrity Policy (which is adapted from the Framework of Skills):
I hope that this help you somewhat in moving this exciting and important project forwards.
Our induction session raised a point of clarification and a question, which I share here from the perspective of building a community of inquiry.
Clearly, not all learning needs to happen through an inquiry involving all six stages in the process. However, it is difficult to imagine any learning that does not involve one or more of the stages. Having said that, students will not fully develop as engaged and empowered inquirers if they never experience a full inquiry involving all six stages of the process in each of our disciplines. The reason for this is that inquiry is a fundamental human response to reality – What! Why? I have been thinking about this in Whitehead’s* terms of there being only one subject-matter for education, which is life in all its manifestations (p. 10), which our students encounter in school primarily as subjects/ academic disciplines. Elsewhere, he says:
“From the very beginning of their education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which they have to make, is that general [conceptual] ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through their life, which is their life.” (p. 3)
This is why we pursue disciplinary knowledge from a stance of wonder and puzzlement, and in an interdisciplinary way, because the manifestations of life/ reality ought to cohere meaningfully, and we have an important opportunity/ responsibility to facilitate this.
X’s question about making Rosenshine and FOSIL-based inquiry explicit in our planning – with important distinctions between medium term planning and individual lesson plans – was in part addressed by Y’s observation on the similarities between quality direct teaching as formulated by Rosenshine and a guided inquiry approach. This is the reason why Tytler’s article is so important, because his table expresses Rosenshine’s principles in terms of an inquiry stance and process, so any explicit occurrence of one or more of Rosenshine’s principles is also potentially a meaningful occurrence of its inquiry equivalent, and vice versa. While these ‘principles’ can’t be neatly assigned to stages in the inquiry process, they may indicate which stage(s) is involved. For example, while Tap into students current/prior knowledge including from previous learning will always be a feature of Connect [and the start of an inquiry], it would likely also be the starting point for a lesson/ series of lessons just focusing on the Construct stage of the inquiry process [because students can’t build knowledge and understanding from nothing in Construct, which is why it follows on from Investigate].
As Z pointed out, this all gives us great flexibility in how together we go about enabling our individual students to develop as engaged and empowered inquirers within our disciplinary communities of interdisciplinary knowledge – a journey of heroic inquiry that we are always making with them.
—
*”Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher best known for his work in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science. … Although there are important continuities throughout his career, Whitehead’s intellectual life is often divided into three main periods. The first corresponds roughly to his time at Cambridge from 1884 to 1910. It was during these years that he worked primarily on issues in mathematics and logic. It was also during this time that he collaborated with Russell [notably on the Principia Mathematica]. The second main period, from 1910 to 1924, corresponds roughly to his time at London. During these years Whitehead concentrated mainly on issues in physics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of education. The third main period corresponds roughly to his time at Harvard from 1924 onward. It was during this time that he worked primarily on issues in metaphysics.”
From <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/>
Whitehead reference: Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York, NY: Macmillan.
On 11 November, Elizabeth Hutchinson and I met for the fifth in our ongoing monthly discussion about education, school libraries and FOSIL-based inquiry.
The recording of this discussion is freely available here on Elizabeth’s site.
I have only just realised that I have not explained what a Signature Work is, or where the idea comes from, which I will do at greater length when time permits.
In the meantime, this is essentially how we present it our students:
Thank you, Elizabeth, and Jannath for sharing the extraordinary progress that you have made since introducing yourself to us in the Forum a little over six months ago!
I have read your post with great interest and hope to have time to reply within the next couple of days.
Thank you for sharing this promising development/ opportunity at your school.
As usual, I am envious of your ability to ground your work with students in such thoughtfully chosen books.
I have read your post with great interest, as well as your attached Overviews, and will reply as soon as I am able.
I have revised the Investigative Journal that students will be using this half term as they now read for information and meaning.
The main change is the inclusion of an example (p. 2 below), which I might tweak slightly for greater clarity. I ended with the poster template from last year’s Signature Work Inquiry Celebration (p. 16), because I may tweak that slightly this year.
I will make this Investigative Journal available here once finalized next week.
I had hoped to reflect here on changes to this year’s inquiry before the start of our academic year in September, but time did not permit.
A major change was that the inquiry started in September – which is the start of our academic year, rather than mid-October – in both Computing and English, which meant that for the first half-term each class had three 35-minute lessons, two in Computing and one in English. This presented an opportunity, but also a challenge. The opportunity lay in more purposefully integrating the digital inquiry component in Computing with the informational reading component in English from the outset of the inquiry. This was also the challenge.
Last year, students were able to choose any topic that interested them, provided that their topic presented them with a problem or question that they would explore and discuss as part of their Signature Work inquiry. This degree of openness was appropriate for the culminating product, which was their GCSE English Language speaking and listening Non-Examined Assessment (NEA) on a topic of their choice (see posts above). This created two practical problems. Firstly, a number of students struggled to arrive at a problem or question related to their topic, which made it difficult for them to fully satisfy the requirements of a Signature Work, or the NEA. Secondly, the wide variety of choice, while eventually a useful way to develop the collection, made it difficult to resource the inquiry with interesting and accessible texts, whether in print or online, in a timely way.
Given that a focus of the digital inquiry component is finding and working with online information, both in databases and on the web, one of our databases remained the most logical place to start. However, all students would need to start with the same article if they were to learn how to access the article virtually [by finding it in the database] and then physically [by printing it] in order to begin accessing it intellectually [by reading it] in their first English lesson.
Having attended a very interesting presentation on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the IASL Annual Conference, the SDGs allowed me to solve both practical problems. Firstly, the Britannica School Intermediate article on the SDGs provided all students with the same starting point, although the SDGs are varied enough for all students to identify with one or more SDGs in a very personal way. Secondly, the SDGs by their very nature inescapably confront students with problems and/ or questions that they will increasingly give personal shape to.
At the same time, following our own presentation at IASL – Recovering the Educational Promise of Inquiry – I had been thinking long and hard about Neil Postman’s abiding commitment to “non-trivial schooling,” which “can provide a point of view from which what is [reality] can be seen clearly, what was as a living present, and what will be as filled with possibility” (1996, p. x). Inquiry, done properly, is non-trivial schooling, and in orienting students towards a problem or question framed within an SDG, the Signature Work inquiry had to do so in such a way that students could see what will be as filled with possibility, and would be empowered to begin fashioning reality from that possibility. Out of this, the theme of the Signature Work inquiry emerged:
The Future Needs You: Living Well in a World Worth Living in
I will reflect on lessons learned from this half term in due course, but end here with an overview the inquiry:
Thanks for this, Mary-Rose.
Some quick thoughts.
Your observation underscores Neil Postman’s point – made with Charles Weingartner more than 50 years ago! – that “of all the ‘survival strategies’ education has to offer, none is more potent or in greater need of explication than the ‘inquiry environment'” (1971, p. 36, emphasis added). This remains the case, and realizing the educational promise of inquiry requires some understanding of the debilitating tendencies that rob inquiry of its potency, four of which we addressed most recently in our AASL presentation – Leading an Inquiry-Based School: Discovering the Promise – which are:
What we have yet to address is the extent to which an individual school is, or isn’t, what John MacBeath (1993) termed an enabling environment, and discussed so perceptively.
In the context of inquiry, the work of the Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project (DICEP) is extraordinary. DICEP started in 1991 as a collaboration between teachers in public schools (Grades 1-8) in metro Toronto and surrounding areas and university teacher educators at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto. Over 10 years, the Project saw a shift in focus from “a study of ‘Learning through Talk’ in elementary science classrooms [to] creating opportunities for inquiry-based learning and teaching at all levels and in all areas of the curriculum” (p. 2).*
Gordon Wells, who led the collaboration, concludes with the following observations:
As for the misapprehension of inquiry in relation to research, we explored this in an INSET session at Blanchelande – Blanchelande 2023 | No Mo FOFO: Developing Inquiry Through Research Homework – from which I quote:
Research is integral to inquiry – mainly in, but not limited to, the Investigate stage of the inquiry process – and aims at “generating evidence for [answering] the chosen/ given question through empirical investigations of various kinds and/ or from consulting relevant [and reliable] sources” (Wells, 2001, p. 191). By definition, then, all research is thoughtful, but only thoughtful research tasks actually develop researchers. And in turn, inquirers.
This misapprehension is what happens when inquiry is divorced from learning important content.
*The work of DICEPS was foundational for the Galileo Educational Network (GEN), which served as the professional learning arm of the School of Education at the University of Calgary from 1999-2022, whose defintion of inquiry ours is enlarged from:
Inquiry is a stance of wonder and puzzlement that gives rise to a dynamic process of coming to know and understand the world and ourselves in it as the basis for responsible participation in community.
References
Edit (2023/10/30): I have added links to the revised graphic organisers and have also added PDF downloads.
—
I include below the next stage in the development of the Portrait of an Engaged and Empowered Inquirer at Years 3, 6, 9, and 13, which are the typical Portrait Attributes Developed Through Inquiry in Years 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10-13.
I will elaborate in due course.
Portrait Attributes Developed Through Inquiry in Years 1-3 (PDF download).
Portrait Attributes Developed Through Inquiry in Years 4-6 (PDF download).
Portrait Attributes Developed Through Inquiry in Years 7-9 (PDF download).
Portrait Attributes Developed Through Inquiry in Years 10-13 (PDF download).
Following our presentation, we were invited by Dr. David Loertscher from the iSchool at San Jose State University to present on Developing Inquiry-Based Schools and School Libraries at their Leap into the Future of School Libraries conference in February.
Details to follow.
Presentation now available for download: Leading an Inquiry-Based School: Discovering the Promise (PPT download).
On 5 October, Elizabeth Hutchinson and I met for the fourth in our ongoing monthly discussion about education, school libraries and FOSIL-based inquiry.
The recording of this discussion is freely available here on Elizabeth’s site.
I continue (and collate) my series – Between the Library and the Classroom: Becoming Integral to the Educational Process – for The School Librarian, the Quarterly Journal of the School Library Association.
—
The School Librarian, Volume 71, Number 3, Autumn 2023
In September 2021, I was appointed at Blanchelande College as Head of Inquiry-Based Learning and am the first Librarian in the College’s long history. In May 2023, Blanchelande was shortlisted for the SLA Enterprise of the Year Award. The Award is an opportunity to demonstrate this column’s thesis, which is that the library becomes integral to the educational process through the purposeful implementation of its inquiry-centred instructional programme as outlined in the IFLA School Library Guidelines, even within a GCSE and A-Level educational pathway.
The library becoming integral to the educational process at Blanchelande was not inevitable.
As the Principal, Rob O’Brien, explains: Although the creation of a well-proportioned library space and a suitable budget was a highly significant and symbolic statement of intent, this material and financial aspect proved to be comparatively simple to achieve. Our vision was for a library that facilitates liberal education in the truest sense – students capable of independently inquiring into subjects and learning to question perceptively and think deeply. However, it took the appointment of a librarian with deep insight into the inquiry process and the subsequent creation of an Inquiry-Based Learning department for us to begin using this vital resource to effectively equip students (and their teachers) with the knowledge that enables them to get more knowledge for themselves.
This powerfully illustrates Harold Howe’s profound observation that what a school thinks of its library is a measure of how it feels about education. On the one hand, the College’s view of education allowed for a library that was integral to the educational process. On the other hand, this required a librarian who could describe what such a library looks like and does, and explain how it becomes so. For this the Guidelines were necessary but not sufficient. While the Guidelines translate the principles of the IFLA/UNESCO School Library Manifesto into practical terms, it falls to us, individually and as a profession, to wrestle these principles into actual practice. Without realising it at the time, this is what I had been doing since becoming a school librarian in 2003, a struggle that led to FOSIL in 2011 and the FOSIL Group in 2019, and that leads still further on.*
The revolution will not be televised.
*This personal journey, upon reflection, mirrors the evolution of the library’s instructional focus from information literacy in the first edition of the Guidelines (2002) to information literacy within an inquiry process in the second edition of the Guidelines (2015).
—
The FOSIL Group is an international community of educators who frame learning through inquiry, which is a stance and process aimed at building knowledge and understanding of the world and ourselves in it as the basis for responsible participation in society.