Inquiry through the Eyes of Classroom Teachers

School librarians are steeped in inquiry. They design instruction around an inquiry process, teach the skills of inquiry, and purchase and provide access to resources that support inquiry. All of these activities are based on the assumption that librarians, teachers, and students have a common understanding of inquiry. Through my doctoral research, however, I discovered that this assumption is not necessarily accurate.

My doctoral research focused on an examination of the inquiry process from the perspective of a classroom teacher team (high school English and American history) teaching a slave narrative unit using primary sources (Stripling 2011). My research uncovered a different approach to inquiry from the traditional focus of a school librarian. I found that these teachers framed their instruction around inquiry-based teaching, rather than inquiry-based learning. This paradigmatic shift impacted the whole arc of inquiry, teacher strategies, student skills, and the use of resources. By understanding inquiry from the teacher perspective, school librarians can integrate their services, resources, and teaching with classroom instruction more effectively.

THE ARC OF INQUIRY

Both teachers felt the pressure of delivering an extensive curriculum to their students in a limited amount of time, and yet both wanted to develop understandings and deep learning rather than accumulated facts. The teachers responded to this dilemma by adopting a method of inquiry-based teaching so that they could ensure that the key concepts were highlighted and still maintain control of the progress through the curriculum. The social studies teacher, for example, exerted control by employing mini-bursts of inquiry that lasted one to two days, not an arc of inquiry that framed the whole unit. Each day, the teacher set the context from the assigned reading, asked questions to probe the students’ understanding and provoke new thinking, required the students to use evidence from the reading in their responses, and led the students to conclusions (already developed by the teacher). The next day, the inquiry cycle started again with a new reading and lesson objective. The month-long narrative unit on slavery was not an extended inquiry investigation conducted by the students, but a series of twenty mini-investigations delivered by the teachers.

Although the teachers in this study followed an inquiry line from questioning to concluding in their daily lessons, they paid little attention to developing inquiry skills in students so that they could conduct an inquiry investigation on their own.

THE ARC OF INQUIRY: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE LIBRARIAN

Given a situation of mini-bursts of classroom-based inquiry, strong teacher control of the inquiry experience, and limited development of student skills, librarians must decide how to enhance the teacher’s instruction and impact the learning without disrupting the teacher’s preferred teaching style. The following suggestions may be helpful:

• Pursue an “embedded librarian” strategy. Go to the classroom to teach the inquiry-process framework, co-teach the skills of inquiry, and offer scaffolds for phases of inquiry that are not emphasized by the teacher (e.g., student-driven questioning, student self-reflection).
• Develop a coherent curriculum of information fluency skills aligned with an inquiry process, content curriculum maps, and the Common Core State Standards. Work with the principal to ensure schoolwide adoption of this curriculum. Target specific skills to integrate into the classroom-based mini-bursts of inquiry.

TEACHER STRATEGIES AND STUDENT SKILLS

In the inquiry-based teaching situations under study, the teachers used two main strategies: questioning and critical reading. The teachers’ questions largely probed beyond simple recall of facts (only 16% were cognitive memory questions). Not surprisingly, since the inquiry was controlled by the teachers, most of the questions were convergent (60% involved teacher prompting analysis and integration of evidence) rather than divergent (only 13% called for students to elaborate, draw implications, or synthesize) or evaluative (11% asked for judgment, value, or agreement) (Stripling, 2011, 178-9). Teacher questioning led students to develop the skills of analyzing, finding evidence in the texts to support their responses, and comparing alternative viewpoints on slavery.

Critical reading was a strategy used most often by the English teacher, because the students were confronted with primary source slave narratives imbued with difficult vocabulary, complicated sentence construction, and historical references. Through the critical reading process, students learned to define vocabulary (both denotatively and connotatively), analyze text for explicit and implicit (ironic) meaning, identify point of view, and use specific evidence to support a statement or response. Again, as in the American history half of their humanities block, these students were asked to analyze, but not to synthesize or evaluate.

Although both teachers modeled or scaffolded many inquiry skills, they did not explicitly teach them. There was no evidence that the students learned how to ask higher-level questions, evaluate sources or the information within them, draw their own conclusions, or develop their own line of argument.

TEACHER STRATEGIES AND STUDENT SKILLS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE LIBRARIAN

An understanding of the skills taught in the classroom can help librarians design instruction to target the ones being missed. Librarians might try to identify the priority skills to teach in a couple of ways:

• Facilitate a World Café professional development session to engage the school community in a conversation about the critical thinking, Common Core, and information skills that are the highest priority (http://www.theworldcafe.com/method.html).
• Conduct diagnostic assessments to identify critical gaps in student skills using scenarios, self-assessments, task-oriented prompts, or tests. Present the results to the faculty.
• Offer collaborative planning to teach the critical skills that students are missing.
• Provide graphic organizers that teachers can use to scaffold or teach inquiry skills in the classroom.

RESOURCES

The two teachers in this study collaborated to select texts that included primary sources so that students could develop authentic understandings of the slave situation. In the social studies classroom, the two main texts offered a mixture of primary and secondary, while in the English classroom the students focused on primary source slave narratives.

The research showed that the use of primary sources did, indeed, provide an authentic view of the multiple perspectives that existed at the time. In addition, however, the research confirmed that students must have the historical contextualization and background provided by secondary texts in order to interpret the primary sources. Furthermore, students needed teacher guidance to make sense of primary sources. For example, students encountered a number of quotations from Thomas Jefferson about the institution of slavery, but the quotes conveyed conflicting attitudes. When the teacher guided the students to place the quotes in chronological order and then to think about what was going on in the country at those times, the students were able to see Jefferson’s changing perspectives over time and understand the contextual reasons for his shifts.

RESOURCES: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE LIBRARIAN

Because the text selection and analysis were carefully controlled by the classroom teachers, the librarian had very limited opportunity to introduce additional sources. She did acquaint the students with the slave narrative recordings at the Library of Congress, seemingly a perfect match with the end-of-unit assignment to write an original slave narrative. Almost none of the students, however, actually used this valuable repository of primary sources, nor did they use the list of resources and links provided on the library website. In fact, students used almost no resources for their projects that were not provided by their classroom teachers.

Librarians are used to providing lists of resources to support classroom instruction. This research indicates that these lists are not effective, especially when they refer to primary sources, because students recognize that they need context and secondary material in order to interpret primary sources effectively.

Some of the implications of this research for librarians to provide more effective access to resources include:

• Provide context for primary sources by intermingling with secondary sources or by offering contextual background material.
• Deliver specialized resources (maps, photos, DVDs) to teachers directly so that they can incorporate them into their lessons at the point of need.
• Teach navigation and evaluation skills in concert with telling students about various resources and work with the teachers to build the expectation for finding additional resources into the unit.
• Teach students how to draw meaning from both primary and secondary sources.

CONCLUSION

Although this research was limited to two humanities teachers, their method of inquiry-based teaching may be more representative of classroom teachers than the librarians’ typical approach of inquiry-based learning. Most library strategies and curricula, however, are designed to support inquiry-based learning when students are conducting their own investigations. If inquiry-based teaching is the model that teachers follow (those who foster inquiry at all), then librarians must adapt their services to teachers and students in the classroom at the point of need. Librarians must begin a schoolwide conversation about integrating skills instruction into content learning in every classroom. Finally, librarians must adapt their methods for providing access to resources so that students are guided through their use and primary sources are presented in context. Librarians can encourage teachers to provide opportunities for students to pursue inquiry investigations, but they must also meet teachers and students where they are and develop new strategies to enhance their teaching and learning in the classroom.