Systematic enquiry made public
Sharing what you have learned from your inquiry is an important stage in the process as it requires the articulation of your ideas and the presentation of them to an audience who have not been directly involved in the experience. Stenhouse talked of the importance of the outcomes of inquiry being ‘made public’ as this would not only ensure the rigour of the work by laying it open to scrutiny but also contribute to the building up of a body of professional knowledge. How the ‘public’ should be understood in this context has been debated and it has been suggested that this could be sharing locally rather than with a national or international audience and need not be in a written ‘report’ but by a range of different means.
Translation and transformation
Certainly, sharing what has been a rich and complex experience with other people presents difficulties in terms of making what you know explicit and understandable. Learning from your inquiry will involve a process of translation and transformation rather than one of transfer or dissemination and so one of the challenges is to understood the nature of any knowledge that has been gained. It is important at this point to raise the question of dealing with neutral or negative outcomes of an inquiry as teachers often find this difficult, even painful, to share with other people as they may feel that their efforts have been pointless or wasted. Recognising that finding out that something hasn’t made a difference is just as important in terms of building up professional knowledge as celebrating ‘success’. It is ironic that as teachers we find it hard to follow our own advice to students that we learn as much from our mistakes - provided we are prepared to acknowledge and reflect on them - as we do from what comes more easily to us. Once again it is being part of a community of inquiry, in which an environment that values problem-posing as well as problem-solving is fostered, that is vital. Otherwise the natural tendency of teachers to feel a sometimes overwhelming sense of responsibility to make things work can undermine confidence.
Professional learning task: Learning from mistakes and problems posed
Consider an inquiry with which you have been involved. Reflecting on both the process and outcomes identify what problems and disappointments were encountered. With hindsight what was learnt from these difficulties? Try to specify the learning gained and how it might help to inform future inquiries.
Sharing as an organic process
Sharing what you learn can be approached in stages, beginning by talking with close colleagues about what you are doing and sharing the highs and the lows, perhaps in your subject department or phase, then moving on to presenting your work to the school on Professional Development days or at staff meetings. As you grow in confidence sharing your work with partners from outside the school will add new perspectives and deepen your knowledge as well as making what you are learning more open and ‘public’. The sharing will be cumulative and be less about you as an individual and more about what is being learned within your community of inquiry as you move to sharing the outcomes with local, national and even international networks. What seems to be most effective is allowing the spread of ideas and the process of sharing to be organic and for school leaders to provide encouragement for developments to grow from the bottom up.
Simple strategies such as providing a lunch for teachers attending a “Show and Tell’ session to share information about an inquiry or including an item on current inquiries or research on agendas for school meetings can be effective means of support. As well as thinking carefully about the extent and rate of going ‘public’ to share learning, the form that the communication of ideas can take should be considered. Whilst written reports might seem to be the obvious means of sharing what you have learned, writing up an inquiry is time consuming and finding a suitable ‘audience’ interested in reading them may not be straightforward. What many communities of inquiry find is that sharing the processes - especially the tools for inquiry- is much more powerful and less onerous. ‘Stealing’ a good idea to try out in the classroom is a more natural form of sharing for most teachers and so developing concrete artefacts that can be used in this way is usually time well spent. Making use of a range of ways of telling the story of your inquiry is also important and posters and learning walks, when tours of the school and interactions with students and teachers enables participants to find out what is happening, have both been used to good effect.
The weave of collaborative enquiry
Researchers in the US who advocate teachers taking an ‘inquiry stance’ in their professional practice have identified three different types of inquiry-knowledge-practice relationship (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2004):
- Knowledge for practice – to implement/codify for dissemination (formal knowledge)
- Knowledge in practice – to uncover and enhance (situated knowledge)
- Knowledge of practice – to generate local knowledge within inquiry communities (testing knowledge in context)