uLearn10 - Breakout 6 - Trevor Bond - Inquiry Learning vs. Good Learning

Inquiry learning or good learning?

Inquiry learning. This phrase carries a lot of baggage and misconception with it. Perhaps it is time to just focus on learning, what good learning is and how we can support our students to be better learners. It is time to stop walking in circles with inquiry learning, its time to focus on what good learning is and revise our teaching practice to fit that picture. This will raise challenges for schools.What are the challenges and how can we address them.
Trying to define inquiry learning is like trying to grab a bar of soap in the bath!

It's the "thing" that everyone is "doing" but it's not just a matter of choosing a model and doing it.

A lot of schools are going in circles because their focus is inquiry when it should be learning. We should be equipping our students to be better learners.


Q1. What is good learning? (not what is good inquiry?) Need to define learning as a school then dfine good/effective learning.

Trevor Bond's definition: Learning is change to one or more of these things - knowledge - understanding - world view - beliefs - opinions (weaken or strengthen) - values - attitudes - behaviours - skills - that is retained, able to be applied and able to be transferred.

NZC page 37. Curriculum is designed and interpreted in a three-stage process: as the national curriculum, the school curriculum, and the classroom curriculum. The national curriculum provides the framework and common direction for schools, regardless of type, size, or location. It gives schools the scope, flexibility, and authority they need to design and shape their curriculum so that teaching and learning is meaningful and beneficial to their particular communities of students. In turn, the design of each school’s curriculum should allow teachers the scope to make interpretations in response to the particular needs, interests, and talents of individuals and groups of students in their classes.


Q2. What are our learning goals? What are you trying to achieve through inquiry? This goal is surely about developing skills and attitudes... to be better learners. What is your school "graduate profile"? How will you know you've done a good job when your Year 6's leave? Build the curriculum to make your graduate profile happen.

Need to be focusing on developing competencies, should be using progress in competencies to assess effectiveness of programmes.

Curriculum coverage statements have been removed from NZC and NAG's.

What are your primary skill goals that will enable your students as connected engaged learners? What are your attitudinal goalsthat will enable your students as connected engaged learners? Establish success criteria associated with these questions.

Cross competency focus = cross competency attitude, cross competency skill - focus on growing skills and attitudes in students.

4 attitudes of life long learners = curiosity, open-mindesness, persistence, empathy.

6 skills of life long learners = ability to:

identify need or problem

identify, understand and use contextual vocabulary appropriately

ability to create and use relevant questions to guide thinking and gain information

acquire, validate and apply relevant information

create and critique information, argument, belief or theory

make informed decisions with due consideration of possible options, consequences and the impact on others.

Focus should be on core elements of learning i.e. taking students and moving them on.


Q3. What are the elements of good learning?

Start point for learning - question, task or concept? so schools should have a concept based curriculum or a task based curriculum or a question based curriculum.

Track "exposure" to the strands.


Q4. What is a good inquiry model?


Q5. What is good inquiry? An approach that delivers your goals SO what is your goal?

Good learning is a process of developing independence (not independence in terms of working alone but independently engaging with others to develop understandings) SO good inquiry is a process of developing independence.

Understandings are developed in the spaces between people.

Good learning = where a student moves towards independence on a growing foundation of literacy - learning is literacy in action.

If kids are not engaged = educational malpractice - so kill it! Teachers must be engaged - if not kill it!

When students are in learning to read stage major resources should be image based not text based.

Reading to learn is inquiry (but must be engaged), exploring learning through reading.

Scaffolding allows children access to learning - provides safety for learners as they build their understanding of learning process and as they develop their learning skills.


Q6. What are the in school barriers? Tie appraisal to schoolcurriculum being implemented well. If model is not delivering what you want then review it - continual reflection. Model needs to become part of school induction process.

What is measured gets done - measure literacy, numeracy, skills/attitudes.

STOP talking about inquiry, START talking about learning. Learning model NOT inquiry model - should work in any context.

Key message: Focus on good learning not inquiry.

Trevor Bond's website

Trevor Bond's NZC wiki

Trevor Bond's questioning wiki

uLearn10 - Keynote 3 - Lane Clark – Learning to Learn – It’s bigger than Inquiry

"Many of our schools are now valuing the importance of teaching their students how to learn. Inquiry learning is no longer ‘new.’ It has become an instructional approach, advocated at the Department level, and realised in many classrooms, internationally. Recognising and celebrating this advance in pedagogy...inquiry is merely a part of a much bigger whole.

If it‘s our goal to see an increase in student levels of engagement; an increase in levels of high school retention; an improvement in student performance standards; and learners skilled and ready to contribute to their world, we need to re-think what we are doing, and how we are doing what we are doing, in schools. We need to teach our kids how to think and how to learn through a comprehensive learning process that mirrors the way in which learning occurs in the outside world. We need to ensure that intellectual rigor, depth of knowledge and understanding, authentic, relevant and purposeful curriculum, our priorities We need to change the way learning is planned, designed, implemented, assessed and evaluated.

What does it mean to learn?
Is there a difference between knowing and learning?
What is authentic learning?
What is integrated learning?
Is there a difference between theme and authentic integration?
What does real learning look like?
What are the similarities and differences between ‘real life’ learning and ‘in school learning’?" Lane Clark

Loved listening to Lane speaking - what a thought provoking educationalist. She made some very important points about real world learning. Definite theme emerging through all the keynote speakers. The question is how to marry this up with school policy, national standards, time constraints...

The ability to learn how to learn – everyone should be cultivating this, it’s not what you know but how you learn that’s important as what you know will soon be obsolete.

How we learn is more important than how much we learn.

So you know it – so what? Can you do something with what you have learned?

Inquiry is where thinking and learning meet.

What does it mean to learn? Is there a difference between knowing and learning? What is authentic learning? What is integrated learning? What does real world learning look like? How does it compare to ‘in school’ learning? Is there a difference between theme and authentic integration?

Teaching should be mirroring what kids will move in to with no teacher there e.g. how often do adults graph eye colour or do animal projects?! Not real world learning.

How can you have a question about something you don’t know? You don’t know what you don’t know! Inquiry is bigger than interest, it’s RELEVANCE.

Colour code questions students ask/form throughout inquiry e.g. week 1 red, week 2 blue, week 3 green. The questions will become more sophisticated as knowledge and new learning is added.

Purposeful and strategic questions come from a genuine need to know something.

A test is one way to learn (find out) what you know.


Inquiry stages

Immersion – immerse children in centres based around the learning/concept/idea, e.g. fairytales – video/TV centre, websites, books of lots of different types (soft cover, hard cover, stapled, bound, library, embellished...), audio tapes, drama centre – lots of diverse mediums to engage learners. Each centre has a taskcard (purpose) and each student has organisers (process). Purpose of centre is to access data, purpose of organiser is to process data. Organisers can be recorded on using words, drawings, sound (audio overlays), using ICT tools – kids don’t have to write to record. Come up with the ‘so what’ during the immersion stage. Important to deconstruct at this stage to generate new ideas later on in the process.

Brainstorm and Inquire – what do we need to know? E.g. fairytales – need to know how fairytales are written, characteristics, book writing process, different forms books can take, audience analysis...

Planning – decide on tools to be used, action planner – self directed learning (teacher modelled and driven moving towards student driven).

Investigation – made up of “petite” inquiries, teachers job to minimise inaccurate access to information.

Stop and Think – Now I Know... include a must do task (real world).

Ideate – putting ‘so what’ idea into action, e.g. want to make a poster, go and deconstruct and investigate posters.

Innovate and celebrate – finding out if you have really made a difference, showcasing.

Evaluation – evaluating learning process – students track their thinking, identify thinking tools used throughout the journey, need to identify tools used to consolidate and encourage future use; set goals in all areas – learning process, thinking tools, oral language skills...

Children need to own, understand and have control of their own thinking.
Achieve differentiation in smarts (multiple intelligences) through tools.

Teachers job is to ensure kids whole brain is engaged.

We should be using same processes in school that they are going to use in life.

“Tell me what your learning job is this second” – kids should be able to answer without hesitation.

Change comes from looking at your weaknesses – they become your opportunities.


Questions to think about:

What are you doing in education?

What do you want to create for kids?

Where are you in your journey?

Where do you want to be?

Key message: Focus should be on learning how to learn.

Blog post by Susie Vesper on Lane's keynote

Link to Lane's PDF handout