Inquiry Process

Been a while since I've posted here. There's so much to consider in the whole process of teaching, a lot of balls to juggle, both physically and mentally. The number of things I would like to write posts about here is overwhelming, but unfortunately so are my physical responsibilities, so setting aside the time or--even more relevantly--the mental space to process and post a blog entry is always a challenge.

Anyway, I've made it through my first semester of teaching. On to the second. So far, this has been the most rewarding job I've ever had (and I've had some good ones!) I'm working at a continuation school, so you'd think this would be harder, but in actuality, I think it's easier. I have more time to work with and get to know each individual student, and that feels like this wonderful luxury, especially since I know I may not be able to enjoy that same luxury next year in a conventional school.

So as we move into the second semester, both of BTSA and my Master's program, a requirement of each is to undertake an Inquiry Project. At Mills, we're learning the value of and procedures around being a Teacher-Researcher, or, as we call it this semester, undertaking Action Research.

The essential idea here is that in addition to practicing, you undertake a systematic, rigorous exploration of some element of the teaching practice that puzzles you or raises questions. It is perfectly acceptable if your inquiry touches on broader themes that are of interest to you, but the question itself must be specific enough to be manageable in the space of a single semester.

So... I'm looking for a single, discreet inquiry question. It should be relevant to my broader interests, but small enough in scope that I can tackle it in a relatively small amount of time.

Picking and articulating the Inquiry Question is one of the hardest yet most important parts of this whole process. It's from there that all the other work of the inquiry process stems; without a good starting point, the possible gain from the rest of it is limited.

So what do I study?

There are a few ideas I have in mind. At the moment, I'm still thinking about broader themes rather than applicability. Here are some of my ideas...

* Student Affective State: I understand student brains in an open, curious, happy affective state are much more receptive to authentic learning than student brains that are closed, unhappy and defensive. This is of interest to me, as I think joy in the classroom is an oft-neglected subject. But I have no idea what my specific research question would be.

* Reading: I am keenly interested in developing the reading abilities of my students, and regularly push them in my classes to read above their level in the hopes of pushing them to develop and expand their reading skills. I would be very happy to do a project around reading, and I have some ideas about strategies I could explore in the classroom.

* Student Production: It's well-established in theory, but often hit or miss in practice, that students should not just be passive receptacles of knowledge, but should create and re-create representations of their understanding, whether verbally, in writing, or through other media. I think this is incredibly important, but there are a lot of questions as to how to bring that into the classroom. Narrowing it down to one avenue to explore would be the challenge.

* Tangible Skills: I'm an English teacher, and I hate to say it but it's a little harder to narrow down the specific, tangible skills that students are learning in English. Reading Hamlet may be widely accepted as important, but what tangible skill does it build? I could see it being very fruitful to investigate this question more deeply and attempt to articulate both what some of the tangible skills are that English teachers and how to measure those. In my own practice, teaching typing, handwriting, and grammer are some of the tangible skills, but though I'm sure the real skills I'm teaching extend beyond those three areas, it's a little harder to pin down those more abstract skills. There's a question here.

Well, just getting my thoughts down for now. I'm going to need to narrow it down, not just to one of those four categories, but also to a specific, measurable, investigate-able question within that broad area of the educational practice. More on that later, hopefully.