I talk a lot about the power of intentions as it relates to our professional practice as inquiry educators. Whether I’m leading a school through a professional learning session or I am working with a small group of teachers on my own campus, I begin with a collection of intentions to bring a presence and mindfulness we all need to arrive with one another.

It’s the end of the year and my, what a year it’s been for us all hasn’t it?

Currently, our campus is wrapping up our last few weeks of school. We are doing a lot of celebrating of the growth of all of our learners, hand holding and affirming one another to joyfully hang on for a few more days and reflecting to document and evidence the learning we’ve done together this year.

Today I submitted the final round of edits and revisions before Leading with a Lens of Inquiry goes to layout. This portion of the publishing timeline means that the Google docs I’ve been working from for the past fourteen months get turned in the layout of the book, the very one you will be holding in your hands in a little over a month.

Going further is a stage in the inquiry cycle.

During this stage, there’s a depth and complexity to learning as connections are made and questions are answered and evaluated to determine next steps in the process of learning. Our findings and conclusions are shared with peers and help cultivate the landscape for conversations and dialogue. We take our learning deeper by inviting different perspectives through more collaboration as we continue to make sense of our learning and reflect on the ways it’s changed over time.

What happens when you align your curriculum and learning experiences and you get blank stares?

Questions are synonymous with inquiry. They are very thing that help us co design the learning with our students. They are the very thing that help us learn what’s important to our learners.

Questions have a way of being more than just a single voice. When we shift our mindset about the purpose of questions, the students do the heavy lifting in our classrooms and questions then become the vehicles we use drive the direction of learning. But, how do we get to this space?

From staff shortages to pressures of performance, the pandemic has put many of us in response mode, turning towards checklists and falling back into routines as way regain a sense of normalcy.

One of the questions I get asked the most is, "Where do I start?". And while there is a depth and complexity to inquiry that gives me the opportunity to do the work I do in schools