[MUSIC] Hello, welcome back. It's a pleasure to be back together again and we hope you're finding the course very satisfying. We're really enjoying the process of being involved in the course. In this part four, what we're going to have a look at-- remember we talked early on about how important we thought curiosity was to lifelong learning? Curiosity as professionals, curiosity in our planning processes, and curiosity for young people - having every learner want to be more curious than when they arrived in our school setting. That's a big, bold, ambitious, hard goal - we think. So, in this last session of this section, we're going to have a look at why an inquiry stance matters, and where the idea of a spiral of inquiry framework - that you can use for the rest of your careers, we hope - came from. Because we always think it's important to look at the research and study evidence as well as our practice evidence, as we try to move our own teaching forward. So, let's have a look at, why inquiry? Well, we have two sources of evidence that we think are important. They're not the only sources of evidence, but they're two powerful, shared streams of thought, I think we could say, that we've drawn on in our thinking and in our experience in British Columbia. And that's some thinking that's been going on in literacy programs in New Zealand - very ambitious literacy programs for the whole country - and in our networks in D.C. where we've been exploring a number of important student outcomes - well-being for young people, literacy, mathematics, how we can live together in society - big, powerful outcomes that we think as Canadians and Kiwis - New Zealanders - really matter in both cases. And they all, probably all of this work float on a sea of teacher inquiry. I think that's an important dimension of both of our systems is that the teacher action research of teacher inquiry has-- we couldn't say perhaps that it's a way of life, but it's certainly something that both countries have embraced as a part of their professional practice. And in our case, as we've mentioned before, our teacher union has embraced this approach too, which is very, very helpful because that helps all of us move forward. So, we have been exploring in British Columbia how if we work together with a shared framework of inquiry, we can lift all learners. And we've talked before about how important we think it is to weave a variety of intellectual traditions together. In this book - or in this report, rather - a professor called Dr. Catherine McGregor has done some research study in our inquiry circles and has summarized her findings in quite a long report, and in a shorter report, that we hope some of you might be interested in exploring. And, here's what teachers had to say when she interviewed them. And these are-- you know, we want you to imagine as you're looking at these quotations that you can hear the voice of teachers. Often these teachers are in quite remote communities, not all of them are, but I believe that I know who this person is. I think I do anyway. And here's what she has to say. "As I grew in my understanding of inquiry, unknowingly, because of the enthusiasm of my curiosity, I was bringing some of my colleagues along with me. And we stopped evaluating methods and strategies and plans as either good or bad, but instead we started to wonder and tweak and apply and revise and share and wonder some more." So, you get that kind of spiral feeling as a group of colleagues begin to explore things together. And I hope you can feel underneath that some of the teamwork that comes from that kind of inquiry. And on to say, "Now that I have experienced the power of inquiry in working with my colleagues, I could never go back to my old ways" of working alone and feeling that burden of responsibility that good teachers do to try to do it all by themselves. I think this power of the collaborative inquiry approach is something that we just commend to you and mention once more that we hope that you're in reflective partnership teams or small networks or connected in some way, or that you use this course as an incentive to connect with interested colleagues from around the globe or locally - either one we think would be terrific. So, that work in our networks of exploration in our province has formed one of the legs - if you like - of this work. The other leg or foundation place for the spiral of inquiry has come from some very interesting research in New Zealand. And let's have a look at that. So, as many countries do, I know when we were in Malaysia the ministry of education was very interested in having every young Malaysian learn to read well. And this is a goal that we embrace too, we think that's a really valuable thing. Lifelong reading has been a personal joy for both of us and we find that almost all of our young people in British Columbia, that's a goal that we want them to share with us. Because we think it matters - just as a way of navigating through life but also a way of having incredible pleasure through reading other people's ideas. New Zealand, the government of the time, the ministry of education of the time, set this as a goal. That they wanted to improve schools' literacy practices by supporting schools to engage in evidence-based inquiry, at both the big level of the school and the smaller level of the classroom. And schools engaged with this literacy project over several years. And as part of this, there was some funding, there were some literacy resources, there was some human resources through facilitation. So, these are all good things. It's that great feeling when you're in a school or a district or jurisdiction to feel, you know what, we're all working on this goal together. Right now in British Columbia there are 600 of us, teachers working on this goal together and we are really finding some interesting and important things together. Well, here's what we loved. And here in this literacy research Professor Helen Timperley, and her colleague, Judy Parr, at the University of Auckland, they looked for three big ideas. They looked to see that it was all about the learners. They looked to see if the teacher was clear in their learning intentions - their belief was that the learners would get it, and that the clarity between the two parts of the learning team, that that was really a key factor. And also, that if adults were going to learn more about literacy, there needed to be some effective facilitation from some trained literacy resources and/or the school principal or an internal facilitator. What we love about this study is this - you know what, it's just great to feel that support when you take on something difficult. I was involved in that kind of work myself as a facilitator of the writing process, and it was a time of peak excitement, as there were some supports and resources, some energy and enthusiasm. But it may be the case as a practicing teacher in your setting, that you have had the experience, as many teachers, thousands, possibly millions of teachers have had the experience that you're supported for a while, two or three years, often, and then, you know what? There's an economic downturn, or there's a political change, or there's a policy change and the support that you've kind of become accustomed to disappears. And what I love about this research is that-- the researchers said, what happens when the support disappears? Because we do live in a real world and that happens. And, they were looking for key dimensions to what would sustain professional learning because if you want young people to learn to read - and particularly the ones who start in vulnerable situations - then it's really important that the work is sustained. And here's what they found - I think this has implications for our planning work. Essentially, what they found is that two years after the support had gone, if teachers kept applying what they've learned in systematic ways, then they could support outcomes for learners. And, that's a good finding. And they didn't fall back. The learners and the teachers kept things going. But the finding that really, fascinated us was this - because essentially, what this finding says is that when schools kept staying with a spiral of inquiry approach, when they kept moving through, asking themselves about persistent issues that were challenging them, exploring it together, continuing to build their knowledge by using an inquiry protocol, and getting coherence - and we all know those of us who have worked in schools, it's hard sometimes to get coherence across classrooms and with our colleagues - then they actually were able to accelerate their gains over time, not just maintain them. Now, to us in the western part of Canada and the Yukon, that's a very important finding because we do have changes, we do have times of, kind of, the generous years where we feel like there's a lot of intellectual support and facilitation and resources. And then we have the leaner years, where we have to rely more on ourselves. So, what this made us really determine to do was explore together with our colleague and dear friend, Helen Timperley, how we could put these ideas of a spiral of inquiry into a framework, write about it, and put it in the hands of teachers, through professional learning so that we could gather the gains that come from a shared collaborative set of stages of inquiry that would help to drive learning forward for young people. So, the next time we're together, we're going to formally explore the six phases of the spiral of inquiry, understanding that it's come from both case study research of school from British Columbia and also a very formal research study, kind of a mega-study in a whole country that prides itself on getting better at literacy. And what we're going to look at are the stages of an entire framework, but also - again, coming back to that inquiry mindset - what's going on for our learners? How do we know what's going on for them, and why does it matter? And, making sure that we continue to explore that territory. And just as a way of closing this session, Judy and I want to remind you that we're always asking you to look to make a connection to your own experience. We're looking to you to select an idea, hopefully, there'll be one or two, at least, that you feel that you can extend. And also to say, you know what? To think of what challenges you. We are passionate about curiosity, we've seen the powerful effects when young people and adults are engaged in things they are genuinely interested in, that they find deeply meaningful from a social and intellectual perspective, but we want you to be thinking too - does that make sense to me? We're always asking: does that make sense and in what ways? So, thank you very much. [MUSIC]
