Teaching as Inquiry - Graeme Aitken

Today as part of our Leaders PLG we had the honour of listening one of NZ's godfather of Teaching as Inquiry - Graeme Aitken! I was blown away by his passion and knowledge. Here are just a few of my notes from this session:

Collaborative Inquiry - An approach to teaching

Often teaching is only about adjusting the learners rather than adjusting my teaching.

Goals as a teacher:

Creating interest, creating confidence, creating achievement

• Bigger evidence of raising achievement
• Less focus on creating interest and joy

To do this we need to:

1. Take stock: add to the data we have of achievement

• Current state
• Student experience 
• Data story: tools to help with this

How to do this:

• Scan
• Can you describe what you are learning and why?
• Where are you going with your learning?
• Name two adults in this school who believe that you can achieve
• NZCER me and my class
• ERO well being survey

2. Focus on the solution

• Defining the problem
• Create focus

• Add the correct next steps to help solve the problem - create the write strategy to solve the problem
• Could be measuring the wrong thing??
• Our best guesses about a fix, then test it. What do we need to learn to aid our best guess?

3. Take action

• Test hunches
• Share successes, failures and improvements
• Discuss whether or not we have made enough of a difference
• This can only happen with trust…
• Got to think about incremental improvements
• It's ok, to make mistakes but not ok to keep on making mistakes

4. Maintain momentum

• How do we spread these ideas
• How do we get other teachers/classes to do the same?