It Was Never Pretty: Nested Investigations Around Inquiry Dispositions

• In Event: Effective or Wise? Teaching and Assessing Professional Dispositions in Education

Abstract

1. Objectives/Purpose: In this paper, the researchers share discoveries from a semester in their on-going efforts to support the development of “inquiry” dispositions with student teachers--even as they strive to grow in their own understandings and implementation of inquiry. The researchers investigated the types of classroom activities, reflections, modeling, and collegial interactions that supported inquiry dispositions for teacher candidates engaged in student teaching. Researchers sought to sustain inquiry dispositions amidst student teaching contexts that focused on standardized testing and high-stakes accountability. The researchers’ goals for the explicitly collaborative inquiry were to support each teacher candidate’s growth as well as explicitly demonstrate the social learning possibilities of working with one’s peers in a mutual exploratory process.
2. Perspective/Theoretical Framework & 3. Methods: In order to be authentic to their research questions, the researchers worked to achieve “inquiry as stance” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) in gathering and interpreting data and critically analyzing their own instruction, even as they facilitated the development of inquiry dispositions in their student teaching seminar. Richards (2011) argues that, “By taking a critical look at our shortcomings, beliefs, curriculum, and pedagogy, we can bring about changes surrounding our own and our education majors’ dispositions” (p. 69). The researchers’ inquiry stance created the space and context for them to reflect upon their instruction and dispositions even as they asked their teacher candidates to do the same.
4: Data Sources: Data were drawn both from the work of the researchers/instructors and their teacher candidates. Sources included the researchers’ teaching journals, emails, notes, and memos as well as candidates’ self-assessments, written reflections, and narratives of their teaching and analysis of student learning in their student teaching classrooms.
5. Results and Conclusions: The researchers found that their personal risk-taking of being open with each other and their candidates about their perceived instructional errors supported honesty and risk-taking by each other and by the candidates. Furthermore, they discovered that candidates who focused on their process of learning and self-analysis found inquiry dispositions to be an essential part of the joy and challenge of teaching. However, candidates frequently self-reported discomfort in being honest with their peers, as they often assumed that they were the “worst” student teacher and feared admitting their mistakes because of this assumption. Finally, the researchers found that this challenge was mitigated as candidates worked together in inquiry groups to focus on student work and offered support to each other in their varying instructional contexts. Finally, an ongoing difficulty for both researchers/instructors and candidates was the push to focus on standardized assessment and neglect critical inquiry dispositions in both the higher education and secondary settings. Given that an inquiry stance is a way of being as much as a way of thinking about teaching and learning, the researchers now seek to take the next steps of this study by inviting the now-graduated candidates into their inquiry work as colleagues and peers.

Authors

• Pamela J. Hickey, Towson University

• Mary H. Sawyer, SUNY - College at New Paltz