Four Ways to Reframe Inquiry as a Conversation

by Barbara K. Stripling

For school librarians and classroom teachers, the word "inquiry" may connote learning experiences that seem daunting, mysterious, and too complex amid the many demands of this school year. Who has the time or emotional energy to embark on full inquiry projects with their students, especially when trying to deliver a challenging curriculum and simultaneously support students (and oneself) both socially and emotionally?

Perhaps it would be helpful to think of inquiry as conversation. We know that we learn about ourselves, others, and the world through conversations. The inquiry process of wondering, investigating, and forming original ideas becomes a natural expression of our everyday experiences when we frame the inquiry process in terms of conversation.

We can think about inquiry as conversation through four lenses: internal dialogue; interaction with text; conversations with others; and authentic conversations with the world. Each of these types of conversations leads to personal engagement, deeper understanding, and an inquiry stance. By facilitating students' conversations, librarians and classroom teachers enable students to develop the skills and attitudes of inquiry in a natural way. As a result, students develop confidence in their own ability to make sense of the world around them and contribute their own ideas.

Internal Dialogue

Students hunger to have time to think about things that interest them. Many bury their own natural curiosity after only a couple of years of schooling in which they have been told to "pay attention" to the learning directed by the teacher, yet curiosity is the basis of inquiry. Enabling learners to engage in a conversation with themselves about what interests, confuses, or excites them is an effective teaching strategy. When we guide students to connect their curiosities to what is being taught in the classroom, we help students recognize that their internal conversations about their learning have value. Librarians can foster students' ability to listen to their own thoughts and ask questions that matter to them by integrating several strategies into their library program.

• Nurture Curiosity. Librarians can nurture students' natural curiosity by teaching them how to use online and print resources to explore answers to their questions and by providing opportunities for them to share their new knowledge with others. Even the organization of the library space can stimulate students to pursue and share new ideas—featured displays of intriguing books, wonder walls for students to post their questions and for others to respond, curiosity days when students share their interests and expertise with others, and exhibition spaces (both actual and virtual) where students share their projects and creations with the school community.
• Teach Students to Generate Questions. I used to think that I could provide a formula for students to ask "good" questions that would lead to inquiry. Now, I recognize that there is no formula, but there are strategies to guide and teach students to generate intriguing questions. Librarians can start by giving students practice in having conversations with their fellow students. Students can then reflect on the types of questions that led to an interesting exchange of ideas—open-ended, probing, authentic, and responsive to what is known and unknown. Kristin Fontichiaro has written about two other effective strategies for librarians to guide students in their question generation: modeling their own process of questioning and giving the students pre-search time to gain background knowledge and generate questions that intrigue them. (See her article "Nudging Toward Inquiry: Developing Questions and a Sense of Wonder" for more on these.)
• Integrate Student Reflections. By building reflection throughout inquiry experiences, librarians foster inner dialogues and self-regulation of learning. Students learn to trust their own thinking and have the confidence to share their thinking with others. Reflections can be captured in inquiry-long reflection journals, daily reflection prompts, reflective note-taking templates, or reflective conversations with the librarian or fellow students at various points in the process of inquiry. Reflective questions can be used by the students before and after each phase of inquiry to make decisions about how and when to move forward in the process. (See 'Reflective Questions through the Process of Inquiry" below.)

Interaction with Text

Reading during inquiry is more than decoding and comprehension. Authentic inquiry requires that readers interact with the text, building on their comprehension of what the author/creator has said to form their own responses and interpretations. Reading becomes a conversation between the reader and the author. Ideally, the practice of interacting with text in all formats becomes a natural way of learning for students in all classrooms and libraries. Students will draw on their own experiences, knowledge, questions, and feelings to take personal responsibility for challenging ideas, assessing diverse points of view, and developing new understandings.

Librarians can teach the essential skills of interacting thoughtfully with text. The following ideas might be helpful:

• Teach Deep Reading Skills. Deep reading skills are those that enable students to move beyond comprehension and bring their personal attitudes and knowledge to form a personal interpretation of the text. (I explored this more thoroughly in a previous subtopic collection.)
• Teach Students to Synthesize. Students can be taught to move beyond summarization to synthesis. Start the students with interactive note taking, in which they respond to the information they are finding by noting personal connections, challenging the ideas or opinions in the text, looking for gaps and inconsistencies, and evaluating bias and its effect on the information. Then teach the students to synthesize by extracting the essential concepts from their notes, highlighting the most important, looking for trends and patterns, and creating their own original ideas and interpretations. Learning to synthesize is difficult, but can be facilitated by providing opportunities for students to expand their personal conversations with text to conversations with others in peer discussions or feedback loops.

Conversations with Others

Establishing a participatory culture in the library addresses every librarian's major goal—to create a student-centered culture of empowered and motivated learning. A participatory culture also supports the idea of inquiry as conversation. When students are encouraged to collaborate, listen actively to the thoughts of others, and share their own ideas, then learning is greatly enhanced.

One essential aspect of a participatory culture is that it must include all members of the community—all students, the teachers, the librarian, administrators, and perhaps even parents. Everyone in that community must feel valued as a contributor and fellow learner. It may be hard for teachers and librarians to shift from the teacher role to the learner role, but the resultant sharing and conversations pay off in terms of enhanced cultural responsiveness, social and emotional growth, deep learning, and a shared commitment to engage with others.

Although strategies for developing and maintaining a participatory library culture should permeate throughout the library program, librarians might start by focusing on the conversational aspects.

• Foster Collaborative Learning. I have often been puzzled by our emphasis in the library profession on fostering collaborative learning among students, but our simultaneous reticence in accepting responsibility for teaching students how to collaborate. Several aspects of collaboration can be taught from the primary grades on, so that students continue to develop their collaborative skills and their work grows increasingly complex and multi-faceted. Important skills include ways to share knowledge in a group, strategies for sharing authority, relationship-building skills, and the skills and attitudes necessary for engaging in authentic conversations with respect for diverse strengths and perspectives.
• Enable Student-Led Discussions. Imagine the joy of students at any age having the opportunity to engage in a student-led discussion about their ideas and feelings related to the concept/topic they are studying or getting ready to research. I still remember those once-a-month days in my junior English class when we circled the desks and talked about ideas. After students decide on the ground rules for inclusive class discussions, they can be taught to listen well to each other and ask probing followup questions like "What did you mean by…?" and "Why do you think that…?" Although students are leading the discussion, the librarian or classroom teacher serves as mediator, setting the size of the discussion groups appropriately so that every student has the opportunity to engage, posing interesting or challenging problems to start the discussion, and modeling active listening and periodic synthesis statements to keep the discussion moving forward.

Authentic Conversations with the World

Ultimately, the goal of inquiry-based learning is to empower all students to be independent thinkers who have the agency and self-confidence to recognize their own capacity to participate as active members of their community. Students should experience authentic connections and conversations with the world beyond school throughout their years of schooling; they will, thereby, be prepared to continue their interaction and participation as full members of the community.

Not every academic subject lends itself to community action, but librarians and teachers can make real-world connections through the assessment products that they ask students to create. Students who prepare a resume for Benjamin Franklin, for example, not only learn the authentic skill of preparing a resume, but also develop an understanding of Franklin's accomplishments in the context of his time.

Facilitation of real-world conversations requires librarians to create a safe and intellectually invigorating environment. The following ideas may spark a library focus on such conversations, leading to active engagement with the community beyond school.

• Challenge Students to Think about and Take Action on Real-World Issues. Students at any age do not live in a bubble. They are surprisingly aware of societal issues and the controversies surrounding them. They can be given opportunities to investigate issues that matter to them and their communities, to listen to different perspectives, to form their own opinions about solutions to societal problems, and to take appropriate action to begin to address the problems. Librarians may be in a position to develop special displays, invite guest speakers and authors, and facilitate a schoolwide community read to enable student conversations about important issues and motivate students to take action.
• Form Partnerships with Community Organizations. The best conversations about real-world issues are those grounded in the community. Librarians can serve as a connector to community organizations that represent the diverse facets of community life, from local cultural and arts organizations to businesses to service agencies. Not only are students introduced to the rich fabric of life in their community, but they have the opportunity to engage in conversations with community members and perhaps become involved in the work.

Inquiry as Conversation

By recognizing that inquiry can be fostered through everyday conversations that students have within themselves, with the texts that they read, with others in collaborative situations, and with the community beyond school, librarians bring students to an inquiry stance naturally and remove classroom teachers' reluctance to engage in inquiry-based teaching and learning.