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Inquiry at IS 93
What is an Inquiry Team, and how is it formed?
An Inquiry Team is a group of at least three individuals from one school, including the principal, who meet regularly to engage in the inquiry process. Effective inquiry work requires a) instructional improvement through innovation, b) a willingness to share practices and examine outcomes openly, and c) team and individual leadership development. Members might be selected based on what they have already achieved in these areas (in use of data, improving outcomes for struggling students, taking risks, and/or positively influencing colleagues). Or, they may be chosen because they have demonstrated readiness, or the ability to share and grow in one or more of these areas.
An Inquiry Team ideally has strong representation by classroom teachers, including at least one person with expertise in a subject likely to be selected as the content focus.
What is the inquiry cycle?
The inquiry cycle is a process through which a school team improves outcomes for a specific group of students with whom the school has not previously been successful, and learns from this experience to make a system-level change so that the school as a system continues to improve.
In Phase I of the cycle, the team uses data to narrow its focus, selecting students, and identifying something small and essential that they do not know. Once the identified skill gap is sufficiently granular it is called a “learning target.” To be sufficiently granular means to be of a small enough “grain size” that a teacher would know exactly what to teach next. Note that this doesn't mean a teacher will know the best way to teach it. But rather the teacher will know what to teach next, and what specifically he or she may need to learn to do so.
Phase II is entirely focused on moving target population students. In this phase, the team studies the “learning conditions” that result in target population students’ outcomes in the identified learning areas. They closely analyze, for example, what these students were taught in relation to the identified skill and/or how they were taught it—highlighting where existing practices have left gaps in students’ understanding that have left them outside the sphere of success. Based on what they discover, team members make a strategic change, monitor improvement, and demonstrate clearly that target population students can learn.
In Phase III, the team translates what was learned in moving target population students into a system-level change strategy that will benefit more students. First, they analyze the decision-making processes that produce the current conditions of learning for target population
students. For example, suppose a team discovered in Phase II that what target population students need to learn is not in the current curriculum. In Phase III they would consider how decisions are made about what is taught. Then they would decide upon and implement one system-level change to align curricular decision-making more closely with evidence of student need, and monitor effectiveness according to measurable indicators of bringing more students into the sphere of success.
Click below to see how individual departments have taken part in the Inquiry process:
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