One of the biggest challenges in teaching is deciding how to best use our time. We are barraged with a large number of decisions each day and the effectiveness of our responses to these often aren’t immediately (or sometime ever) particularly clear. While not all the outcomes of these decisions have a big impact on student learning or our limited time and energy reserves, others do. In particular, how we go about identifying student learning needs and any subsequent decisions we make about our professional learning, planning and assessment in response to this are an important factor in student learning.
At the beginning of ‘a’ teaching as inquiry, developing a focus based on what’s going on for students’ learning can be a complex task. Our own priorities need to be lined up with the students’ learning outcomes despite all the pressures which might misalign these. We also need to be able to accurately identify the multiple factors that make up each student’s response to our efforts to make learning happen, develop some explanations for why this might be occurring and then choose which explanations are the most adequate to describe what we’re seeing and therefore the most useful to focus on. If that sounds like an overly complicated abstraction of the focussing inquiry, check out what can happen (school-wide in this particular example) when we incorrectly identify the learning need(s) behind what we’re observing. Good focussing inquiries can can take time and effort and this is all before we even get to figuring out what our response could be. We can over-generalise about what the contributing factors are, sometimes putting student needs all in one group when their contexts may actually be quite different. It can also be frustrating to see feedback or data that suggests that our best planned attempts at making learning happen haven’t yet hit the mark for some students.
A focussing inquiry can be a excellent time to use ICTs (and lowtek ways) to get an accurate picture of what is going on and developing some explanations or theories on why this might be happening. Developing our understanding of both what’s happening and why is important in a focussing inquiry as we want to use our time and energy as wisely as possible. Interpreting data and observations accurately when developing our focussing inquiry will ensure our efforts in a teaching inquiry are also as useful as possible.
Finding out from students what’s happening for them can be done in a conversation or interview, recorded on a smartphone or computer and analysed later for anything we might miss at the time. Google forms can be used to collect specific information and we can use colleagues to look over our questions beforehand to see they’re going to elicit the information we need. If we want a quicker way of collecting feedback on our reading of a situation we might use mentimeter, twitter or another micro-blogging client to collect data from students during a lesson. We might also set up a google doc to record our observations of whatever learning is or isn’t happening and add our ideas to explain what might be behind this. We could then invite a number of colleagues to give feedback on the document if face to face contact is a bit harder to organise. It’s also really easy (although perhaps slightly irresponsible) to spam a large number of people with a google doc invites so we can get as much input as possible into our explanations for what we’re seeing.
All of these methods can lead to more adequate, more effective focussing of inquires which, in turn, can lead to more useful and productive teaching inquiries. Hopefully, other outcomes from these two steps will be effective teaching and learning in response to our analysis and research and then some sustained change in practice or an effective response in the future a similar context that we develop in the learning inquiry. Obviously using all these ICTs to collect data are viable and perhaps more common in a learning inquiry but if we can more effectively tune our focusing inquiries using similar collaboration and data collection, the learning gains at the back end can be even more effective for our students and their learning.
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