Inquiry: A Study of Continuous Improvement (2nd Edition) ACT ON THE RESULTS Identify the Make My Purpose Write the Work Question Public PLAN Reflect on Describe the the Action Plan Process Success Partners Refining structures, conditions & processes leading to powerful Parent-School Partnerships resulting in student success Illustrate Identify the the Data Findings Review Analyze Related the Data Implement Practices & Literature DO THE STUDY the Action Plan & Collect Data Schools and their families participate in a thriving, collaborative partnership ensuring the success of the child, where partnership activities are supported by the SUFS Office of Student Learning. The mission of the SUFS Office of Student Learning is to assist and support the establishment and maintenance of structures, conditions and processes within schools that sustain collaborative partnerships with parents and families to ensure the academic, social and emotional success of every child; while at the same time, upholding the belief that the ultimate responsibility for the education of the child resides with the parent. Table of Contents Welcome from Dr. Carol Thomas 1 What is Inquiry? 3 Identify the Purpose PLAN 8 Write and Refine the Question(s) PLAN 9 Describe the Action Plan PLAN 10 Identify the Data PLAN 11 Review Related Practices and Literature PLAN 13 Implement the Action Plan and Collect Data DO THE STUDY 14 Analyze the Data DO THE STUDY 15 Illustrate the Findings DO THE STUDY 16 Reflect on the Process ACT ON THE RESULTS 17 Preparing to Make My Work Public ACT ON THE RESULTS 18 Directions for Study Write-Up ACT ON THE RESULTS 20 Sample Continuous Improvement Studies Empowering Parents to Educate their Children Author: First Grade Teacher 24 Building School Culture and Parent Involvement through a Book of the Month Club Author: Elementary School Principal 31 How will Early Parent Connections Affect, Improve or Encourage Behavior and Performance? Author : Third Grade Teacher 35 Office of Student Learning Dear Colleagues, I want to thank you for your commitment to the power of parent-school partnerships where parents and teachers are working together for the success of the child. You are to be commended for your willingness to study the structures, conditions and processes in your school that support and encourage those partnerships. Last year you engaged in collaborative work to identify specific goals and objectives as well as to establish goal teams to implement those objectives. A natural next step is to examine the impact those processes or structures have had on your school community collectively or individually. To help you accomplish that task, this guidebook has been developed, entitled “Inquiry: A Study of Continuous Improvement”. We will refer to this as the Inquiry Guidebook. Inquiry, the study of one’s own professional practice, is a well-established method in educational research and is also referenced in educational literature as “action research” or “practitioner research.” For the sake of the work we are engaged in, we will discuss the process of inquiry through the creation of a Continuous Improvement Study. This is a constant reminder for us that this work does not have a beginning or an end; rather, it is ongoing with one improvement growing from a previous improvement process. Creating a Continuous Improvement Study is a way for you as a teacher to make public what you are already doing: asking questions about your practice, making changes to your practice, and determining whether those changes have improved your practice and impacted student learning. Using this booklet as a guide, you will intentionally study one of your practices related to your school’s Parent- School Partnership Plan and seek out change by reflecting on what you are doing. With the Inquiry Guidebook, you will identify one of the Parent-School Partnership Plan objectives that is most important to you, frame questions that you want to answer related to that objective, consult established relevant research, implement an action plan, collect and analyze data, and then share the resulting new knowledge with your colleagues. This new, shared knowledge will help all educators to improve their practice. By cultivating this continuous improvement stance, teacher and administrator quality will be enhanced, and your students will benefit. The pages in this book will help you structure your Continuous Improvement Study, ensuring that this important work is captured and easily recorded for others to read, thereby allowing them to grow in their practice. Again, thank you for engaging in this most powerful and personal professional development! Yours in learning together, Dr. Carol Thomas Step Up For Students Vice President, Office of Student Learning Success Partners 1 Inquiry Guidebook NOTES 2 Success Partners Inquiry Guidebook Excerpt from Inquiry: A Districtwide Approach to Staff and Student Learning (2011) Nancy Fichtman Dana, Carol Thomas, & Sylvia Boynton What is Inquiry? Inquiry is the systematic, intentional study of one’s own professional practice (see, e.g., Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993, 2009: Dana & Yendol-Hoppey, 2009). Inquiring professionals seek out change by reflecting on their practice. They do this by engaging in a cyclical process of posing questions or wonderings, developing and implementing a plan of action based upon relevant literature or practice, collecting data to gain insights into their wonderings, analyzing the data, taking action to make changes in practice based on new understandings developed during inquiry, and sharing findings with others (see the Inquiry Cycle on the front cover). Components of the Inquiry Process The process of inquiry enables educators to tie their own learning directly to the learning of the children they teach. Let’s look closely at each component of the inquiry process. Wondering/ Question Development A wondering is a burning question an educator has about his or her practice. Teaching (and learning) is an incredibly complex endeavor. Because of this complexity, it is natural and normal for many issues, tensions, problems, and dilemmas to emerge in classrooms and schools. Rather than sweeping them under the carpet and pretending they don’t exist, educators can embrace and celebrate these problems by naming them in the form of a question and making a commitment to do something about them. Wonderings can be individual, emerging from a single teacher’s classroom dilemma or a single principal’s desire to improve his or her administrative practice, or they can be collective, emerging from a team of teachers, administrators, or an entire school who wish to work together to improve some aspect of schooling. Examples of an individual teacher’s wonderings might be “How will the facilitation of authentic learning through an online learning community in my fourth-grade classroom contribute to my students’ development of positive attitudes toward learning as well as their achievement?” “How will using role play and simulations increase my students’ understanding of historical events?” “What are some strategies I could utilize to facilitate better literature discussions?” Examples of an individual administrator’s wonderings might be “How do I use learning communities as a tool for teachers and myself in the transformation of the writing curriculum in my school?” or “What role does instituting a school-wide meeting play in creating a caring school culture?” An example of a team or school-wide wondering is “How do we create more culturally responsive teaching across all of the classrooms in our school, and what happens to student achievement as a result of implementing culturally responsive pedagogy?” Finally, an example of a shared, administrative team wondering might be “How can we make the district-mandated classroom walk-through process more meaningful to our work as principals?” Framing a wondering in the form of a powerful question is a critical component of the inquiry process because the question drives the quality of the work. For more information on the development of wonderings, see Chapter 2 of The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Classroom Research (Dana & Yendol-Hoppey, 2009) and Chapter 3 of The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Professional Development (Dana & Yendol-Hoppey, 2008). Success Partners 3 Inquiry Guidebook Data Collection Because the emphasis of job embedded learning is on systematic, planned, intentional, and regularly scheduled efforts to embed the adult learning in a school system into teachers’ and administrators’ daily work, data collection is defined simply as “capturing the action that occurs in classrooms and schools.” Although some of the most pervasive data in schools today include quantitative measures of student achievement, such as performance on standardized tests, progress monitoring tools, grades, and other assessment measures, data can come from many different sources and may include the following: • Field notes o Scripting dialogue and conversation o Diagramming the classroom or a particular part of the classroom o Noting what a student or group of students are doing at particular time intervals o Recording what a teacher is saying • Student work • Documents (e.g., lessons plans, IEPs) • Interviews • Focus groups • Digital pictures • Video • Reflective journals • Blogs • Surveys • Critical friend group feedback Given the complexity of teaching and learning, it is important for educators who engage in inquiry to collect multiple forms of data to gain insights into their wonderings. In addition, one form of data that should be an essential part of all educator inquiry is literature. Although we often don’t think of literature as “data,” it is a useful way to think about how the inquiry work occurring throughout a school is informed by and connected to the work of others. No school exists and operates in a vacuum. Hence, when educators conduct inquiry, their work is situated within a large, rich, preexisting knowledge base that is captured in books, journal articles, newspaper articles, conference papers, and websites. Looking at this knowledge base on teaching and learning as an existing “given” for data is important to inform practice.