Last week I was lucky enough to attend a workshop facilitated by Usha James of The
Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2) focused on Planning, Supporting and Assessing Inquiry. Usha is a skilled facilitator and I was eager to spend the morning learning with her. She did not disappoint! Usha pushed us to think hard about our practice and the ways that we support critical inquiry in the classroom.
Nurturing an Inquiry Stance
Usha described the inquiry approach or stance we want to nurture in a way that really resonated with me. She talked about the importance of framing good inquiry questions but also providing students with more specific, smaller inquiry challenges to help build or encourage inquiry dispositions. She likened inquiry challenges to climbing a mountain, where once you reach the summit and achieve that specific challenge, you want to carry on further, towards the horizon.
Intentional Interruptions
As a facilitator, Usha was engaging and clearly read her audience. Instead of front loading all of the instruction and possibly cutting off possibilities for learners, Usha started her workshop with a broad inquiry based task and then intentionally interrupted us to force us to slow down and think more deeply about our work. For example, she provided us with an image and time to discuss what we think we saw. After some initial discussion, she interrupted briefly with some direct instruction. She then gave us the more specific challenge of not inferring what we thought was happening in the picture, but of only articulating facts/details/observations. This is harder than you might think. It forced us to slow down. She later noticed the group was focused on the central image in the photo. Once again she interrupted; this time pointing out that good thinkers also pay attention to the peripheral details. She gave us a concrete thinking strategy, asking us to make observations and inferences across a 5-Ws chart. Finally, she interrupted the conversation once again and gave us the next step. She wanted an informative explanation - but she didn't give us the success criteria up front, she allowed conversation to happen first, for possibilities to be explored and then success criteria was shared.
Usha reinforced the idea that the teacher plays such a critical role in inquiry based learning especially through supporting and sustaining student inquiry.
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