What are the components of an effective Collaborative Inquiry?

What are the components of an effective Collaborative Inquiry? 

An effective collaborative inquiry should stem from an urgent student learning need. When brainstorming student learning needs best practice is to come to the table with evidence based on data, observations and conferencing with students.

In the "Facilitators Guide" Donohoo outlines how to "Frame the Problem" with your team. Her approach is easy to follow, allows for everyone to have a voice and provides examples.

Once you have the problem you are looking to solve you want to develop an inquiry question. The "Question" is what guides the inquiry (the actions, data and evidence). When developing the question it has to be explorative and promote discovery, begin with the words how or what, and specify the focus of your team's inquiry.

Donohoo suggests using a sentence stem when creating a question for a collaborative inquiry:

What is the impact of .... (classroom practice/ teacher action)  On .... (Student Learning)

Here are some examples taken from the "Facilitators Guide"

1. What is the impact of using exit cards with my students?
2. How can we work with teachers to help students achieve success in their written work through student led conferences?
3. How can 'Self Assessment Matrixes' be used to improve the self regulation skills of adolescents?

Next the team must determine a story line that will connect their preferred future with specific strategies that will be used to improve teaching and learning. These are framed as If...Then statements.

Example:

If teachers use exit cards at the end of a science lesson then teachers will be able to determine student learning and next steps.

It is important to determine what evidence will be collected in order to answer the inquiry question.

Donohoo sorts the type of data into four types: Student Learning Data, Demographic Data, Perceptual Data, and School Process Data.

In my experience working in collaboraive inquiries it is not as important to dwell on the type of data as it is to determine what evidence will be collected, how it will be collected and by when.

Getting this information in writing and agreed upon by the team helps to keep everyone on track as it is easy to walk away from a group meeting, return to the classroom and continue as normal.

Setting dates to come back together as a team and report on how things are going is critical as well as providing time for this to happen. We have used staff meetings to work on collaborative inquires.


The research for Collaborative Inquiry comes from the following resources: