Inquiry for Equity: Supporting Teacher Research

Abstract

Urban schools in the US are rapidly changing institutions due to demographic changes. These changes present many new challenges for teachers. As a nation, we must respond so that our educational system meets the needs of our changing student population. The approach that we describe in this chapter to address this challenge involves preparing and supporting teachers with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to change their practice as needed by their changing circumstances. Teachers who have the ability to engage in collaborative reflective inquiry are well situated to learn and understand the context within which they work and make adjustments in their practice as needed. The ultimate goal of the project is to help teachers provide learning opportunities that will lead to equitable and excellent outcomes for all students.

Appendix

Studying our Practice

Given the field’s interest in creating professional learning communities, and our own interest in understanding our work more fully, we conducted this 2-year (06-07 and 07-08) research and documentation study of our facilitation practices and their outcomes for the Mills Teacher Scholars Project. As part of the study, we tracked the inquiry experiences of the scholars including the processes they employed and the products they produced. Our goal was to determine what the learning outcomes were for the different features of the project with a focus on which parts were more or less effective in supporting the reflective inquiry of the scholars.

For this 2-year period, we videotaped our monthly meetings including a random selection of the small group discussions that occur regularly at each session. We also collected freewrite feedback from the teachers at every meeting - some of it open-ended and some of it focused on questions about inquiry and the work of teaching. Additionally, we kept track of the evolving questions of the scholars so that we could determine the direction of their studies and the hurdles they encountered along the way. Since the final product of the project each year, for each scholar, was a personal webpage that he or she contributed to regularly throughout the year, we had access to the scholars’ thinking as it evolved over time as well.

This study of our facilitation practice mirrored the studies the teachers were conducting of their practice, which provided an opportunity for us to model some of the reflection processes we hoped the scholars would employ in their inquiry work. After each meeting, we analyzed the data collected at that session and then reported back to the scholars at the following meeting. We videotaped the monthly discussion on our “findings” and drew on these data as another source for our investigation. These taped discussions with the scholars also provided a validity check.

The videotape and website data provided an opportunity to check for correspondence between what the scholars said they were doing and learning in their monthly feedback freewrites and what we were able to observe in their actual work. Overall, our process was iterative; as we followed our documentation design, questions arose that required collecting additional data. Our on-going analysis allowed us to check for inconsistencies as they arose in the data and to build our understanding of this complex and demanding work.