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Source:National School Reform Faculty Online Publication A Passionate Inquiry into Teacher PracticeBy Linda Emm at LEmm3@msn.com September, 2005 Critical Friends Group (CFG) work has always been about taking an inquiry stance. We ask questions about pieces of text, about the student and adult work we bring to the table, and always about our own practice: “how can I get better at this complicated art of teaching so that my students are eager to learn?” We so love questions that Juli Quinn has become legend with
Edorah Frasier and the Southern Maine Partnership developed the Probing Questions Exercise and the Pocket Guide to Probing Questions because they believe strongly that a well-asked probing question is the greatest gift a presenter can receive in a Consultancy. We are all about questions. So is it any wonder that the idea of infusing more formalized our work has been something so many of us have strived has always been to make the inquiry a seamless part of the work we do in our CFG, rather than something tacked on somehow outside the regular practice. Nation School Reform Faculty facilitators in Florida have tried to do this for the past several years, with mixed results. Nothing seemed to really catch fire. Sometimes it even felt like we were giving something up to do the inquiry pieces, and we sensed that this wouldn’t be true if we could just figure it out differently. Enter our partnership with the Lastinger Center for Learning at the University of Florida. Much to our delight, Professor Nancy Fichtman Dana is actively engaged in teacher research, and is the co-author (with Diane Yendol-Silva) of “The Reflective Teacher’s Guide to Classroom Research.” Pete Bermudez brought her work to the attention of those of us working with the Lastinger Teacher Fellows Program in eight Miami-Dade County, high needs, high poverty schools. Our work in Dade involves three-hour monthly meetings with faculty members committed to becoming reflective educators who adapt their practice to better meet the needs of their students. Sounds like a CFG, right? It does to us, too, which is why NSRF facilitators Tom Fisher, Belkis Cabrera, Simone Waite, Sandy Champion, Vanessa Vega, and I eagerly joined Pete Bermudez in the work. Nancy’s work is centered on defining teacher inquiry as the “systematic, intentional study by teachers of their own classroom practice.” This is different from the usual way we wonder informally about our students’ work in that it is less happenstance, more visible, and more organized. She talks about how complex teachers’ work is, and the felt difficulties that affect our work. The place where these two areas intersect is the wonderings teachers have all the time. She believes that if teachers focus on these wonderings they will connect to an area they are really curious to know more about – and the idea for their inquiry project will be born. To further help teachers find their wonderings, Nancy talks about there being eight passions that teachers have about their work. Sometimes these are what drove them to the profession in the first place. Often people enter with one passion and then become passionate about another area of their work. These are useful tools for opening the conversation with teachers about the inquiry process. However, it wasn’t until Belkis Cabrera asked people in her group at Chapman Elementary to group themselves by their passions that an idea was born to adapt Nancy’s passion into an activity similar to the Profile of a Student. Profile of a Student is a beloved activity for talking about how it felt to be the kind of student you were in high school. How was your experience shaped by the kind of student you were? Were teachers able to engage you in high quality work? How? If not, what would it have taken to inspire you? The resulting conversations are profound and shed light on the kind of work we need to be doing with our students in the present. Might we adapt this format to get teachers talking about why they entered the profession? Most people get here through a strong passion, even a sense of mission. We wondered if this new process could help teachers both reconnect to their original sense of purpose and identify some questions they care deeply about? Using Nancy Dana’s eight passions as a model, we thought about what they would look like if they described certain teachers. What would they be most interested in? How would their “interests” affect the content and context of their classrooms? What is the hook or passion that keeps them coming back day after day? After crafting eight teacher profiles, we adapted the directions for the conversation to pretty much mirror those of the Student Profiles Protocol, and took the whole thing for a test run with our Lastinger Teacher Fellows.
The resulting conversations were intense and thoughtful. After identifying others with similar passions, these passion alike groups charted the kinds of questions they most wonder about. These questions have helped us get at the idea that teacher inquiry is grounded in passion. When that passion is combined with a sense that “if I just knew more about this one area, my students would be so much more successful,” it becomes easier to develop a question to guide the inquiry.
Pete and I brought the Passions Profiles to the National Facilitators’ Meeting last April, and had our colleagues look at them with a critical eye and actually try out the process. We received helpful feedback on some of the profiles, and are still fine tuning them. Since then, we have used this process in a variety of settings. Several Lastinger Teacher Fellows have fine tuned questions which came out of this process and are crafting Inquiry Action Plans, which will drive their collaborative work as well as their Individual Professional Development Plans next year. What we are most excited about is the natural flow of this work as part of the work a CFG does. We have been quite explicit here in Florida that a CFG or a Professional Learning Community (PLC) is NOT defined by who is in it, but by the work the group is engaged in. A critical aspect of this work is to be curious about one’s practice and be willing to engage in the ongoing work of adapting that practice to the needs of the students we serve. We know from experience and enormous amounts of research that the most effective professional development is work that is job-embedded, ongoing, and driven by the needs of teachers and students at the school site. Discovering ways to embed the practice of inquiry in our CFG work is a way to keep authentic learning at the heart of what we do. And that’s exciting. Passion ProfilesPassion 1: The ChildYou became a teacher primarily because you wanted to make a difference in the life of a child. Perhaps you were one of those kids whose life was changed by a committed, caring teacher and you decided to become a teacher so that you could do that for other children. You are always curious about particular students whose work and/or behavior just doesn’t seem to be in sync with the rest of the students in your class. You often wonder about how peer interactions seem to affect a student’s likelihood to complete assignments, or what enabled one of you ELL students to make such remarkable progress seemingly over night, or how to motivate a particular student to get into the habit of writing. You believe that understanding the unique qualities that each student brings to your class is the key to unlocking their full potential as learners. Passion 2: The CurriculumYou are one of those teachers who are always “tinkering” with the curriculum in order to enrich the learning opportunities for your students. You have a thorough understanding of your content area. You attend conferences, and subscribe to journals that help you to stay up on current trends affecting the curriculum that you teach. Although you are often dissatisfied with “what is” with respect to the prescribed curriculum in your school or district, you are almost always sure that you could do it better than the frameworks. You are always critiquing the existing curriculum and finding ways to make it better for the kids you teach—especially when you have a strong hunch that “there is a better way to do this.” Passion 3: Content KnowledgeYou are at your best in the classroom when you have a thorough understanding of the content and/or topic you are teaching. Having to teach something you don’t know much about, makes you uncomfortable and always motivates you to hone up this area of your teaching knowledge base. You realize that what you know about what you are teaching will influence how you can get it across to your students in a developmentally appropriate way. You spend a considerable amount of your personal time—both during the school year and in the summer—looking for books, material, workshops, and courses you can take that will strengthen your content knowledge. Passion 4: Teaching Strategies and TechniquesYou are motivated most as a teacher by a desire to improve on and experiment with teaching strategies and techniques. You have experienced and understand the value of particular strategies to engage students in powerful learning and want to get really good at this stuff. Although you have become really comfortable with using cooperative learning with your students, there are many others strategies and techniques that interest you and that you want to incorporate into your teaching repertoire. Passion 5: The Relationship between Beliefs and Professional PracticeYou sense a “disconnect” between what you believe and what you actually happens in your classroom and/or school. For example, you belief that a major purpose of schools is to produce citizens capable of contributing to and sustaining a democratic society, however, students in your class seldom get an opportunity to discuss controversial issues because you fear that the students you teach may not be ready and/or capable of this and you are concerned about losing control of the class. Passion 6: The Intersection between Your Personal and Professional IdentitiesYou came into teaching from a previous career and often sense that your previous professional identity may be in conflict with your new identity as an educator. You feel ineffective and frustrated when your students or colleagues don’t approach a particular task that is second nature to you because of your previous identity—writer, actor, artist, researcher, etc.—in the same way that you do. What keeps you up at night is how to use the knowledge, skills, and experiences you bring from your previous life to make powerful teaching and learning happen in your classroom and/or school. Passion 7: Advocating Equity and Social JusticeYou became an educator to change the world—to help create a more just, equitable, democratic, and peaceful planet. You are constantly thinking of ways to integrate issues of race, class, disability, power, etc. into your teaching; however, your global concerns for equity and social justice sometimes get in the way of your effectiveness as an educator—like the parent backlash that resulted from the time you showed Shindler’s List to your 6th Grade class. You know there are more developmentally appropriate ways to infuse difficult and complex issues into your teaching and want to learn more about how to do this with your students. Passion 8: Context MattersWhat keeps you up at night is how to keep students focused on learning despite the many disruptions that go on in your classroom/building on a daily basis. It seems that the school context conspires against everything that you know about teaching and learning—adults who don’t model the behaviors they want to see reflected in the students; policies that are in conflict with the school’s mission, and above all, a high stakes testing environment that tends to restrain the kind of teaching and learning that you know really works for the students you teach.
Passion Profiles ActivityRead the passion profiles and identify the passion that most accurately describes who you are as an educator. If several fit (this will be true for many of you), choose the one that affects you the most, or the one that seems most significant as you reflect on your practice over time. [5 minutes] Without using the number of the passion profile, ask your colleagues questions and find the people who chose the same profile you did. [5 minutes] Directions for Small Groups:
Recorder/reporter should write on the newsprint, and should be ready to report out succinctly to the large group. Be sure to put your Passion Profile # at the top of the newsprint page.
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