[MUSIC] Welcome to week four, lecture four, Spirals of Inquiry, the final two stages: taking action and checking. Just as a reminder, Linda introduced you to the whole spiral. She focused on scanning - getting a clear idea of what the experience of our learners is. Then on focusing - where are we going to put our time and attention. Then last week I talked about developing a hunch - using our intuition to surface what we think, in what ways we're contributing to the experience of our learners. And then we talked briefly about new professional learning - that we're going to acquire some new learning connected to the focus for our learners in hopes that we will take more informed action. And now, we're moving to this phase of actually taking action. And this is where we're going to try some things differently in our classrooms. A key point that we'd like to make around this is that things rarely work well the first time. And it's easy to get discouraged when we're trying out a new practice, or a new approach, or a new procedure, and particularly if the learners don't respond very well to it, then we'll drop it and just go back to our old ways of doing things. So, we need to think, how do we create the conditions for ourselves within our classrooms, and within our schools where we feel safe to try something new and safe if it doesn't work and then an opportunity to figure out what we're going to do next? We really like the school that we met in Australia that has created that spirit of risk-taking through what they call Flop Friday. That every Friday after school the teachers get together and say "What was it you tried this week that really didn't work?" And they have a laugh about it and then together they think through "What can we learn from this, and what will we try next week?" So, we need to make it natural in our classrooms, in our schools, that we're going to try some things, they may not work but we will always learn from the experience. Another thing that's really important when we're taking new action or trying things differently in our classrooms is not to have it as a surprise for our learners. Letting the learners, letting the young people know ahead of time that we're going to be trying something new and then asking for their feedback about it, about what worked for them and what advice would they have for you the next time is a very important way of bringing them in to your learning and for you to be modeling to them that learning is ongoing. It's also important and this will depend on your context but to let parents know and families know if you're trying something different, so that they can have informed conversations with their children at home rather than responding negatively because they don't understand what it is you're doing or trying to do. So, taking action actually is fairly complicated because it's about thinking deeply about new ideas. It's about bringing others in to your thinking. It's about sharing what you're doing. It's not just about implementing a set of strategies or introducing a new program in isolation. It needs to be informed. It's also about our opportunity to think about what works better than other things. And how can we, in our planning, build on what we're learning and what's working really, really well. Taking action really involves practice. So, we want to say, all right, over the next three or four weeks we're going to be trying a new strategy and we're going to try it repeatedly. We're going to refine it, we're going to try it again, we're going to talk with our colleagues. We're going to share our learning journey. We're not going to be afraid about being perfect, about having everything right or being judged as, wanting, if we try something and it flops - as the Australians so eloquently have taught us. So, how can we model for our learners that we're going to be trying something new and we're going to be seeing how it goes? Which takes us to the final stage in the spiral, which is checking. Now, we know simply by virtue of trying something different, thinking a little bit more deeply, paying a bit more attention to our learners, we're going to make a difference. The question that we say in the Spiral of Inquiry is, have we made enough of a difference? And do we know how we're going to determine what kind of difference we want to make? So, this takes us right back to the scanning process that we need to say, what's the experience of our learners? Let's go back to the school where the learners were anxious and were really particularly worried about math - in checking if we've made enough of a difference, we want to know has the levels of anxiety gone down, and has the mathematics performance gone up? How will we determine that? What evidence will we look for that we're actually making enough of a difference? So, checking is fundamental to the Spiral of Inquiry. It's not just a routine to follow. It's something that's embedded in, all the way though. It's not just done at end of the term or the end of the unit. It's done all the way along. Might be done mid-lesson - how are we doing? Are we making enough of a difference? So, it's done regularly so that we can make adjustments in a timely fashion. So, if we think about the spiral in its entirety and we go from scanning through focusing, developing a hunch, new learning, taking action and checking, we could see this taking place over the course of a unit, a term, a school year and many iterations within that. So, what we're really trying to encourage you to do is to think about the Spiral of Inquiry as a way of planning for learning in your classroom, and deepening the learning of your learners by really focusing on what their experiences are, what their needs are, what learning you need to bring to this, how you can model new learning for your learners, and how you could determine ultimately whether you're making the kind of progress that you hope to see. So, let's just take a couple of more minutes to think about checking and how it leads us automatically back into scanning. The point that we really want to emphasise is that the inquiry spiral is ongoing. One question, one focus area will lead us to the next. And we want to think about going broader and more deeply as we continue our professional learning and our planning for instruction. So, checking, it's not just done at the end of the term or at the end of the year or at the end of the unit, it's done on an ongoing basis. Scanning, we're also going to be doing that on an ongoing basis, that's just what we do as teachers. And, in a formal way, we want you to think about checking, have you made enough of a difference? And then thinking about going back into the spiral and asking yourselves, alright, what's going on for our learners now? Where is the new area that I need to focus on? What is it that I need to learn more about next? What new actions will come out of that new learning? So, it's an ongoing spiral, and if we remember the image that Linda described earlier on, that the spiral goes out, and then it comes back in. Scanning takes us out, back in into checking and back out into scanning again. So, we see this as an ongoing, professional practice that can inform your planning. And we know, based on the work of thousands of teachers, that will deepen your practice if you give yourself the opportunity to start thinking in this way. In the next section, in the next week, we're going to be going more deeply into the area of teacher professional learning and what we've learned from the research about what makes a difference to learners and to their outcomes and how we can strengthen our own learning as teachers. So, thank you and look forward to seeing you then. [MUSIC]
