“Unless teachers have opportunities to develop their own understanding of the richly webbed core concepts and modes of inquiry in the fields they teach, they are not likely to perceive their goals in such terms. Few schools make such opportunities a priority for their in-service teacher development activities.”

This quote comes from “Teaching for Understanding” by Martha Stone-Wiske and the gang at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. (Think: David Perkins, Howard Gardner, etc).  I’ve been using this book a ton the last 6 months. I think its a great resource.

As my understanding of good inquiry/good teaching continues to grow, one of my ah-ha’s is that inquiry gains traction when framed as ‘disciplined-inquiry’ – that is moving beyond generic skills and competencies into a place where students are taking on the ways of thinking and behaving of different disciplines. I often turn to this High Tech High video – “I want my kids behaving like a scientist, behaving like an actress, behaving like a filmmaker. Not just studying it, but being like it.”

Of course this requires a significant change in the role of the teacher. Yes – it requires teacher to move to the side a little and open up spaces for students to live and breathe within a topic. Yes – it means teachers have to re-think assessment and what it might mean to demonstrate understanding in this way.

But I also think it means teachers have to re-think how they conceptualize the very topics they teach.  I think if teachers continue to see learning as students ‘getting content’ then all the technology, assessment, innovation, collaboration, creativity, etc that we are striving for  won’t do much. In the word of one of my mentors, Dr. Sharon Friesen, this is just tinkering around the edges.

Rather, for real transformation to occur requires a radical shift in how we view knowledge and understanding. Understanding not as trivia or formulas or mental stuff to get but as learning to thinking productively and flexibly with problems in a particular area of study.

Or (again from Teaching for Understanding):

“Curriculum designed to promote understanding does not simply impart information. Rather, the curriculum must involve students in continuing spirals of inquiry that draw them from one set of answers to deeper questions that reveal connections between the topic at hand and other fundamental ideas, questions and problems”

That’s where the first quote above caught my eye. If we want student to learn to think creatively and flexibly within ‘rich and complex webs of knowledge’ then what are we doing to allow teachers to play and be creative within these topics themselves?  How can teachers create the complex conditions (it has to be more than just letting kids loose online) where inquiry can flourish if they experience those spaces themselves?

What if PD was and support for teachers to do math, do science and do history as a pre-cursor to planning those same tasks for students? To be able to play in those spaces themselves? To learn the ways of thinking and behaving?

An example:

In partnership with the Galileo Educational Network, the school I work at has been working at using a lesson study approach to math PD for the last three years. I believe there is great potential in  this approach – but it requires a ton of heavy lifting by teachers. After slogging away for a couple years something really significant changed at the end of last school year. In small groups teachers worked through rich math problems themselves first – not worrying about how they would teach a particular concept – but rather playing attention to their own problem solving approaches and working through the forming of conjectures, testing hypotheses  and looking for patterns – just as they want they kids to do.

Something changed when the teachers moved from talking about teaching math to teachers doing math themselves. Interest when up. Buy-in went up. And the momentum is building…

Whatyda think – how might PD be built around teacher collaboratively playing in topics themselves?

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Related posts:

1. Learning as Play
2. The Starting Point for Inquiry
3. The Long Tail of Professional Development
4. Reflective Professional Development
5. Professional Development and Leadership – Part I