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.

Lifting up the voices of educators who are not afraid of taking risks, finding innovation within the systems we are given and connecting a global network and audience are all attributes of what’s behind the publication, STEMED Magazine.

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?

I had the pleasure of visiting an elementary campus today. It was the culmination of work I had been doing with the coordinator and school over the last few years and the purpose of the in person visit (such a treat now!) was the celebrate their growth in inquiry.

Reflection. An action at the heart of an inquiry practice and one that I am quite often drawn to in my work with teachers and leaders. With the ever elusive time that we all seem to not have enough of, I’ll be sharing more about the transformation that this move has within our roles as leaders during the 2022 TIES event.

In recounting the dynamic ways in which using the leadership lens of inquiry has brought about changes to our teachers, campus culture and even ourselves as the leaders, we center ourselves on reflection throughout the process of change.

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.

Perhaps a final step isn't exactly what I mean to convey to you as it relates to inquiry, but it's the final one I will share with you in this series of blog posts.

In my past newsletter, I shared one of my most revisited moves as an inquiry teacher, provocations. I spend a lot of time coaching inquiry leaders, co planning with teachers on my campus, and engaging in rich and meaningful professional learning sessions with schools around this concept.