“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.
Professional learning task: Reflecting on how things went
Reflect on an inquiry you have undertaken by considering the following:
- What went according to plan?
- What was easier than anticipated?
- What was more difficult?
- What had you predicted?
- What surprised you?
- What other things would you tell someone, drawing from your experience of how the inquiry went?
Letting the data speak
Because your inquiry has been integral to your teaching then you are likely to have generated a lot of different forms of information at different points in time and one of the first steps is to make a table of what you have got. It can be helpful to organise the table according to the kinds of data (observations; lesson evaluations; student work etc.), details of the participants (who observed, who was observed etc.) and the tools you used (fortune line; student logs etc.) and when you collected information (frequency and dates). You should also consider if there is any school data available that has been collected for other purposes but which could help in the analysis of the outcomes of your inquiry. You will be aiming to triangulate the different forms and sources of information as this will help you to draw conclusions and test the robustness of any conclusions you may be reaching. You will also, inevitably, be triggering a lot of tangential thoughts and you will need to postpone these for the moment as you focus on answering the question you posed at the start of this cycle of inquiry. The key to success at this stage is to guard against finding what you are looking for and this is where working with other people in a community of inquiry is vital.
Professional learning task: Constructing your table of inquiry
Consider an inquiry you have or are carrying out. Using the guidance given in the last paragraph construct a table which sets out: the kind of data gathered; the source of the data; details of participants; and the tools that you used.
Using the benefits of collaboration
Working collaboratively with colleagues and research participants is the best way to ensure that your interpretation of the data is reasonable and representative. There are a variety of ways that you can approach this: you can ask a colleague to watch a short piece of video or read part of an interview transcript, without telling him what your conclusions have been and simply ask him what seems to be interesting or important. You can feed back your analysis at an early stage to research participants, by reporting questionnaire results to parents or students and asking them to flesh out the headlines, or to challenge your assumptions. As a matter of good practice, anything you write about others should be available to them for their comment at a draft stage. Not everyone will want to read or comment on your research but the opportunity to pick up on errors of fact or interpretation should be there. Your research conclusions will be so much stronger when backed up by the validation of your colleagues and your participants. (Baumfield, Hall and Wall, date)
It is also important at this stage to make links with existing research so that you are aware of what is already known about the issue. The following account from a teacher illustrates how you might tackle making sense of an inquiry.
It was all downhill for Moctezuma: one teacher’s story
Dawn decided to try out a Fortune Line activity with her class of nine year olds who were working on the topic of the Aztecs that she had just learned about on a training day. The focus of the lesson was to look at a time line of events connected to the invasion of South America by Cortes and his meeting with the Aztec king Moctezuma. Dawn had prepared some statements based on a narrative account of the interaction between Moctezuma and Cortes and had decided to have some groups sequencing the statements from the perspective of Cortes and some groups taking Moctezuma’s point of view. She wanted the class to discuss how the two men’s fortunes intersected with the same events having very different consequences for them.
The lesson begins with Dawn reading a vivid account of the meeting between the two men and then the students look at a time line on the board showing when the events occurred. They then form groups and are given an envelope of statements and a large, laminated Fortune Line graph, blu-tac and some washable marker pens. They listen as the task is explained and then Dawn tells each group which perspective they should take during the task. The groups quickly become engrossed in the task, leaving Dawn free to move around and eavesdrop on the discussions. The information she is gathering will be useful for the plenary session and will help to decide who she will call upon to contribute ideas.
She notices that a boy called John in one of the groups is making some interesting suggestions, which are being listened to by his peers. What strikes Dawn as unusual about this is that John is not usually very co-operative and tends not to have anything to contribute when stories or historical accounts are being discussed in class. Another interesting feature of the interaction in this group is the response of the others who are listening to his suggestions so carefully; this includes the self-appointed ‘leader’ a rather assertive boy, David, who usually likes to take a dominant role in any activity. In the plenary session, it is David who feeds back to the class information on how they have constructed their fortune line but Dawn notices that he is using some of John’s ideas. John is still fully engaged in the task and everyone in the group is clearly very pleased with themselves. When all of the groups have presented their Fortune Lines, Dawn asks for any final comments or reflections and is surprised to see John put up his hand. She is even more surprised when he offers a succinct appraisal of the intersecting fates of Moctezuma and Cortes commenting that after their meeting it was ‘downhill all the way’ for Moctezuma – a direct reference to the steeply descending line drawn on his group’s graph.
This experience triggered Dawn’s interest in inquiring more deeply into the dynamics of the group to discover how the Fortune Line activity had changed the usual pattern of interaction amongst the participants. Over the next six weeks she observed the group when she was using thinking skills strategies, including the Fortune Line, and when she wasn’t. During this time she began to form a question based on her ‘hunch’ that it was the presentation of the task in a visual form – using a graph – that was important for engaging John in the lesson. To test this out, Dawn began to gather evidence more systematically by using a learning log for students to record their responses to lessons and invited a colleague to complete an observation of a group working with a Fortune Line. The tools helped Dawn to gain a better understanding of what the class as a whole liked and disliked about particular activities and what they thought about the Fortune Line.
The evidence she gathered was sufficient to confirm her ‘hunch’ that it was indeed the graph format that was the key to holding the boy’s interest. Dawn shared her findings about the importance of using visual representation with colleagues to get their perspective and also with the Educational Psychologist the next time that she was in the school. As her interest grew, Dawn wanted to know more and began to actively seek out advice on what to read in order to learn about research into the use of visual approaches to learning and their impact on students. The Educational Psychologist was able to pass on some articles and Dawn presented her inquiry to the rest of the staff on the next in-school training day.
Fuelling professional dialogue
The process of enquiry and reflection is an important part of dealing with the messy and ill-structured problems we face in the daily practice of the classroom; it is because teacher research is specific to a particular context and deals with complexity that it is so valuable. It is also important for colleagues not directly involved to hear about what you have been doing. Your findings can contribute to the promotion of professional dialogue within your school by posing problems. highlighting issues and outlining possible solutions based on real situations. Lawrence Stenhouse saw teacher enquiry as offering a new perspective on research:
…it is not enough that teachers’ work should be studied: they need to study it for themselves. What we need is a different view of research which begins with our own work and which is founded in curiosity and a desire to understand; which is stable, not fleeting, systematic in the sense of being sustained by a strategy. (Stenhouse, 1995)
It is accounts from people who have direct experience of teaching and learning in classrooms that can be most persuasive.