Collaborative inquiry to support teachers and enhance students’ learning

Exploring teaching dilemmas as a group enables educators to transform their practice in a way that matters to them and their students.

At a Glance (click to reveal)

• Traditional teacher professional development uses a transmission model, in which perceived experts share information with teachers that they are expected to then use in their classrooms.
• Collaborative inquiry (CI) invites teachers to work with others to answer questions about their work and how they can improve.
• Successful CI projects focus on what is actually happening, explore real dilemmas and questions, offer flexibility in teachers’ and researchers’ roles, have institutional support, and include opportunities for teachers to share their work.
• State, district, and school policies as well as teacher working conditions can limit the effectiveness of CI projects.

Oscar has been a teacher for four years, all of it in fourth grade in a midsize urban school. Many of his students are immigrants for whom English is not a native language. One early fall morning, he asks his students to pull out their reading textbooks. While they do this, he opens his teachers’ copy, which is cumbersome and almost falls to the ground.

The lesson for that day is locating details in a text. Because so many of his students are unable to read the text in English (although most are competent readers in their native languages), he reads the two-paragraph text aloud. Some students appear to be following along in their own textbooks, but several are looking around as if lost or confused. After reading the text, Oscar asks the students how they would describe the main character, an older man. A few students raise their hands and make brief comments (e.g., “He’s old,” “He seem nice”), but most continue to look confused and are silent.

Later, Oscar comments that he doesn’t feel like he’s an effective teacher, that he knows many of his students can’t understand the text, and that reading it to them isn’t going to help much. He wishes his district hadn’t mandated the textbook and would let him use his knowledge of second-language acquisition and the reading instructional methods he learned in a master’s degree program he completed two years earlier.

Hoping to improve on the textbook-centered approach, Oscar joins a university/school collaborative inquiry (CI) project with teachers and the principal from his school and two teacher educators from a nearby university. At twice-monthly meetings, the group discusses data they have been gathering in small groups. For example, one week, Oscar brings his observations of the reading strategies that a small sample of students did and did not use. Midway through the project, he shares a questionnaire he and the university-based teacher educators developed that asked students how they felt about reading and their strengths and limitations as readers.

After a few months of CI group meetings, Oscar reorganizes his instruction so students work together or with him (e.g., a bilingual English/Spanish-speaking student works with a non-English-speaking Spanish speaker as they read and discuss a book about fossils written in both languages, and small groups of students with similar needs meet with Oscar for focused reading instruction grounded in their needs). When reflecting on the impact of the CI project, Oscar comments that his current students are engaged as readers, enjoy reading, and are making much more progress as readers than in previous years, when he relied on the textbook.

 

The promise of collaborative inquiry

When we began our careers as teachers, the dominant view about teacher learning was that professional development (PD) programs should directly transmit strategies to teachers who would then enact them in their classrooms (Strom & Viesca, 2020). That is, these PD initiatives provide teachers with the input that becomes the output that they implement in their classrooms. This approach to PD is based on widely-held assumptions about teaching and teacher learning, including the notion that teachers are mere conduits through which information is transmitted.

Once we finished our graduate studies and became teacher educators and educational researchers, we were compelled by the notion that collaborative inquiry (CI) involving teachers and other stakeholders, including university faculty, school administrators, and parents, can drive educational transformation and innovation, as well as teacher learning and development. CI enables teachers to learn in collaboration with others as they investigate how learning and teaching unfold within the multifaceted contexts in which they live and work.

Instead of positioning teachers as knowledge recipients, CI projects bring participants together to investigate and understand a phenomenon under study

In contrast to transmission-oriented PD initiatives, CI conceives of teacher learning and practice as interacting with teachers’ social and professional environments (Cochrane-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Matusov & Pease-Alvarez, 2020). Factors that influence teacher learning and practice might include teachers’ and students’ histories and identities, reform agendas, educational policies, workplace and administrative hierarchies, distribution of material and monetary resources, and school- and district-sponsored PD opportunities.

Instead of positioning teachers as knowledge recipients, CI projects bring participants together to investigate and understand a phenomenon under study, relying on one another to “discover and challenge previously held assumptions” (Schnellert, Kozak, & Moore, 2015, p. 220). In so doing, they co-construct their learning and the production of knowledge.

 

What we have learned about CI from our work with teachers

For more than 30 years, we have jointly and separately engaged in several CI projects, some short-term (a few months) and others more long-term (over several years) involving teachers and students from minoritized communities in grades K-8. These projects have contributed to transformations in the way teachers engage with and understand their students.

Five features characterize transformative CI projects that we have experienced:

• Focus on what is happening
• Explore dilemmas and questions
• Have flexible roles
• Find institutional support
• Share our CI work

 Focus on what is happening

To facilitate our understanding of what transpires in a learning setting, we have often spent concentrated time with teachers and prospective teachers exploring data at lunchtime, after school, in evening meetings, in the summer, or during teacher education courses. In these meetings, we have collaboratively analyzed our collective observations of students’ talk, actions, writings, and reading. In these situations, the focus has been on what students and teachers do, rather than on outcome data like student test scores.

One example involved second-grade teacher, Kevin, and his newcomer student, Arabic-speaking Mohamad. Kevin and a fourth-grade colleague, Camilla, were our partners in a CI project investigating the teaching of writing using a writing curriculum developed by Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (Calkins, 2013). To Kevin, Mohamad’s written work looked like the invented writing of a much younger child, leading him to think that Mohamad may not have known how to write, or at least write in English.

He brought a sample of Mohamad’s writing to a meeting and the four of us pored over it to figure out what Mohamad had written. In so doing, we discovered that Mohamad was writing in English but with a lot of developmental spelling. This insight led Kevin to treat Mohamad’s writing as something meaningful and not as incomprehensible scribbles. Consequently, he began conferring with Mohamad about his writing, as he did with his other students.

During the same CI project, we shared data with Kevin and Camilla that we thought could provide them with important insights into what was happening in their classrooms during the writing workshop. For example, at the beginning of the project, the teachers were not comfortable with a lot of student-to-student talk during independent writing time as they were concerned that the students were off task. Once we shared advantages associated with encouraging talk, particularly with English learners, they began to wonder about the nature of their students’ talk. This led the four of us to engage in a study of talk in their classrooms, which included audiotaping students. When we examined transcripts of these recordings during monthly meetings, we all learned that student talk included clarifying instructions, seeking help with a word, and exploring ways to go forward with their writing, but we rarely found that students were off task. Consequently, the teachers encouraged more student talk during the writing workshop.

Explore dilemmas and questions

Throughout our collaborations, we and our co-researchers raised dilemmas, issues, and questions that became the focus of conversations, which ultimately led to new inquiry questions, insights, and, in some cases, practices. This was the case, for example, when Kevin shared his concern about Mohamad’s writing. During meetings, we did not always agree with each other, but all group members had opportunities to raise and grapple with different perspectives.

This often occurred in a CI project Lucinda engaged in with undergraduate students who wanted to become teachers and who worked in an after-school program serving mostly children of Mexican descent from minoritized communities. One year, the undergraduates voiced their mixed opinions about the value of helping children with homework. Some argued that helping children with homework was necessary for children’s learning of school content; others argued that fun activities, like art projects, should occupy children’s time in the after-school program.

Lucinda suggested that they focus their written observations on the nature of children’s homework assignments and on occasions when they helped children with homework. While discussing their observations in class and on an internet discussion board, some students claimed that many homework assignments were focused on discrete skills and memorization that the children found boring (e.g., phonics worksheets, lists of spelling words). Others told the class that children enjoyed working on assignments that drew on their experiences and/or interests. Consequently, many of the undergraduates concluded that children enjoyed and benefited from doing homework assignments that were aligned with meaning-making and culturally relevant perspectives on learning and teaching. 

Have flexible roles

In our CI projects, participants often assumed different, but complementary, roles. For example, when we worked with classroom teachers, we were not usually responsible for managing or teaching a class. This was the teachers’ responsibility. We usually generated initial research questions and collected and analyzed much of the data. At times, we were uncomfortable with taking the lead as researchers, thinking that our projects were not truly collaborative.

As we worked with teachers, they assumed greater responsibility for research activities, including, for example, expanding and abandoning research questions that we had initially generated.

However, as we worked with teachers, they assumed greater responsibility for research activities, including, for example, expanding and abandoning research questions that we had initially generated in favor of questions that we all agreed were more interesting. For example, the two of us had not originally identified the role of talk as a research question in the study focused on teaching writing. However, when the teachers expressed concern about it, it became a focus of our inquiry.

There were also occasions when we assumed the role of co-teacher. For example, over the course of an academic year, Lucinda and a fifth-grade teacher, Leslie, co-facilitated and investigated a program in which Leslie’s students tutored kindergartners and first graders. From the very beginning, they thought co-facilitating the program would lead to improvements in the way they approached cross-age tutoring, which was new to both of them. Over the course of their collaboration, they discussed with one another what transpired during tutoring sessions, which led to insights about tutors’ and tutees’ literacy development and how they could make the collaboration productive and meaningful for all participants.

We also sometimes took on a PD role when sharing expertise with our teacher collaborators, typically at the teachers’ request. For example, in the CI project focused on the writing curriculum, the teachers sometimes asked Katharine to demonstrate a teaching point during our regular meetings. For example, at the teachers’ request, she demonstrated how to help students collaboratively generate aspects of good writing at the beginning of a unit on a given genre, such as poetry or story writing. The teachers then began to incorporate this approach at the beginning of their writing units.

Find institutional support

Institutional support was important to the success of our CI projects. Sometimes, this was monetary support. Whenever we could, we obtained grants that provided teachers with some financial support for their participation. It would have been very hard to ask busy teachers to spend so much time collecting and sharing data and meeting with us without some tangible benefits. We also sought to provide support by being flexible with meeting times.

Another form of support came from our universities, which enabled us to engage in CI projects that were part of the university program or course of study. For example, a CI project was an important component of the course, Multicultural Children’s and Young Adult Literature, that Katharine taught in a master’s-level reading specialist program. She had noticed that many of the K-8 classrooms she had visited did not have more than a handful of books by authors from diverse cultures.

In the course, students, all of whom were practicing teachers of children from diverse cultural backgrounds, had to collect data on the books in their classroom libraries. The teachers collated their data individually and then, as a class, recorded the results and found that their classroom libraries typically had very few books by authors from underrepresented groups. Subsequently, the teachers expanded their classroom libraries with the help of school and district resources and online funding. Several teachers commented that their students became much more engaged readers once they saw people who looked like them in books. 

Share our CI work

Over the years, when we have engaged in more traditional research, in which we have been the researchers and teachers have been informants, we alone have reported on our research in writing and at conferences. However, in CI projects, our CI colleagues have joined us in writing and talking about our work.

For example, Katharine worked closely with a teacher, Gail, to investigate the influence of literature study circles on the reading and literacy behaviors and attitudes of fifth- and sixth-grade inner-city students from ethnically and linguistically diverse backgrounds. They presented at conferences, together and separately, and wrote a book about their work (Samway & Whang, 1991). They also wrote articles, one of which had four students as co-authors. Teachers value hearing directly from other teachers about their work. And sharing the work affirms CI participants as knowledgeable and effective teachers.

Challenges of collaborative inquiry

Although we have had successful experiences with CI, we have also encountered constraints that made it hard for us to collaborate as fully as we had hoped. The most notable were structural forces and norms within institutional contexts in which the teachers worked. These tended to revolve around policies and working conditions. 

The policy context

Policies at the federal, state, and local levels often shape what and how teachers teach, particularly in schools and districts serving students from minoritized communities (Maniates & Mahairi, 2011). Curriculum mandates requiring teachers to use a specific curriculum is one prevalent practice in many schools and school districts. In our work, we have found that curriculum mandates often limit the degree to which teachers engaging in CI projects can fully explore approaches and practices that they feel would most benefit their students.

This was apparent in the study exploring the implementation of the Teachers College writing curriculum. The teachers felt obliged to use the curriculum as written because their school had decided to do so, which limited how much they could investigate and implement practices they believed would enhance their students’ learning. For example, particularly at the beginning of our collaboration, Kevin and Camilla commented that the curriculum often did not address the strengths, interests, and needs of their predominantly Latinx students from immigrant backgrounds. Because they felt compelled to use the units faithfully, they were reluctant to stray from the curriculum.

Working conditions

U.S. teachers’ working lives fit within a specific, often unwavering schedule. Because the majority of their working day is spent engaging with students and fulfilling specific obligations (e.g., overseeing students’ lunch, conferring with parents), they usually lack time for anything else, including reflection. To fully engage in a CI project, teacher participants need time to think, plan, reflect, and organize. However, this kind of time wasn’t always available to the teachers with whom we worked.

In addition, PD provided by the districts in which we worked tended to be conventionally constructed, following a transmission-oriented approach, rather than collaborative inquiry involving teachers and other educational stakeholders. This was true even in districts where PD staff expressed a commitment to teacher inquiry as a venue for their learning.

Finally, districts that emphasize top-down accountability and increasing student outcomes on high-stakes tests typically do not focus on teacher inquiry that positions teachers as knowledgeable and active agents in learning and teaching. Such districts prioritize and fund transmission-oriented teacher training focused on getting teachers to implement preset curricula they assume will improve student outcomes (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). We have certainly observed this tendency in the schools and districts where we have worked, particularly during the time that No Child Left Behind prevailed (Pease-Alvarez & Samway, 2012).

A rewarding process

Despite these challenges, we have found CI projects to be tremendously rewarding. We and our teacher co-researchers have benefitted from an expanded range of understandings and insights by working collaboratively. We have appreciated being exposed to and challenged by views that may have been different from our own. We have also learned that a successful CI project benefits from institutional support that recognizes a more democratic approach to PD.

 

References

Calkins, L. (2013). A guide to the Common Core writing workshop. Heinemann.

Cochrane-Smith, M. & Lytle, S.L. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. Teachers College Press.

Maniates, H. & Mahiri, J. (2011). Post-scripts: Teaching reading in the aftermath of prescriptive curriculum policies. Language Arts, 89 (1), 10-21.

Matusov, E. & Pease-Alvarez, L. (2020). Moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education. Dialogic Pedagogy: A Journal for Studies of Dialogic Education, 8.

Pease-Alvarez, L. & Samway, K.D. (2012). Teachers of English learners negotiating authoritarian policies. Springer.

Samway, K.D. & Whang, G. (1996). Literature study circles in a multicultural classroom. Stenhouse.

Schnellert, L., Kozak, D., & Moore, S. (2015). Professional development that positions teachers as inquirers and possibilizers. LEARNing Landscapes, 9 (1), 217-236.

Strom, K.J. & Viesca, K.M. (2020). Towards a complex framework of teacher learning-practice. Professional Development in Education, 47 (2/3), 209-224. 

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the teachers and students with whom we have had the honor of working and learning with. We would also like to thank the Spencer Foundation and University-Community Links for their financial support of our research.

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This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 5-6, pp. 39-43.