Learning in Tandem: Professional Development for Teachers and Students as Inquirers

This study explores the first year of a grant-funded professional development program that utilized collaborative inquiry to develop teachers' capacities to enact inquiry learning with secondary students in a variety of content areas. Guided by a vision of inquiry as a complex endeavor, located along a continuum of decisions about authentic disciplinary tasks and student autonomy, as well as a situated view of teacher learning, researchers examined surveys, reflective writing and teacher work samples to explore the relationship between developing capacity for both student and teacher inquiry. Teachers reported satisfaction with their learning about teacher and student inquiry while exhibiting capacity at mostly beginning levels. Ultimately, these results led to discussion of the practical and conceptual dilemmas for facilitating teacher learning when the two inquiry processes for teachers and students are developed in tandem. While conceptual shifts in planning and assessment were noted, practical capacities of both were limited. Most teachers, however, evidenced interest in inquiry for engagement and no shift in embracing more self-directed views of their own learning in spite of professional development interventions.