“To be genuinely thoughtful we must be willing to sustain and protract that state of doubt which is the stimulus to thorough inquiry, so as not to accept an idea or make a positive assertion of a belief until justifying reasons have been found.” (Dewey, 1933:16)
No “quick fixes”
Once you have refined the focus of your inquiry by translating a ‘hunch’ into a question that is both answerable and manageable, found or devised tools for your inquiry and formed a community inquiry with your partners, you need to make sense of what you are finding. The extent to which this will be more or less difficult is dependent on how successfully you have negotiated the previous stages but making sense of the outcomes of an inquiry is always a challenge. It is not unusual to end up with more questions than you started with and as one teacher put it ‘I am confused but at a higher level!’ However, the absence of an easy ‘quick fix’ answer need not be discouraging and the learning that takes place during an inquiry is powerful and rewarding in itself. Frequently, teachers embark on a series of cycles of inquiry as the review of one ‘plan-do- review’ sequence generates new hunches. Nevertheless, there is a need to make sense of an inquiry if subsequent actions are to be evidence informed and particularly if you are to be able to share what you are learning with other people.
Messiness and transparency
The first thing to do is to embrace the ‘messiness’ of inquiring into what is happening in your own classroom, what is valuable about your inquiry is that it is conducted in an authentic setting and this means that it will reflect the fast pace and shifting, multiple variables that are integral to teaching in the real world. Rigour in teacher research is achieved by ensuring that your account is transparent so that everyone can know exactly what you did (and didn’t do) and why so that another teacher can express an opinion regarding your decisions and replicate your inquiry in their own context if they so wish. The best way to ensure transparency and replicability is to focus on the process as well as the outcomes of your inquiry and pose questions to yourself to stimulate recall.