Teachers’ Role in Inquiry
Male:
[00:00] But yeah, I, I think, you know, your role as a teacher is, you know, if it’s not
that planning directly to an end, it’s, it’s seeing, um, what, seeing what are the other
possible routes? What are the other …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Male:
… possible ends and how can we get there?
Male:
Mm-hm.
Male:
And how can we help children understand all the things that they want to
understand?
Female:
Right.
Male:
And how can we help make sure that other children in the room understand what one
child knows?
Female:
Right. Yeah.
Male:
Right? Helping them, helping them make those kind of connections. So, like, in, you
know, in this electricity unit that we just did, it came out quickly from the kids, right?
From what they were saying—and that they needed to understand what atoms and
electrons and protons and neutrons were …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
… in order to understand electricity. And that’s not in the curriculum at Grade 6.
You would wonder why. But it’s not. So, you know, the, they, they quickly fig—
realized amongst themselves, and by—through the questions they’re asking, I could
tell that they had realized this, that, you know, it wasn’t good enough for them to
know that electricity flowed through this wire somehow.
Female:
Right. They wanted to know how?
Male:
They wanted to know, “Well, what is flowing through the wire?”
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
“What’s moving down the wire? Okay, it’s electrons. What are they?” Right? “How
are they there? How are they attached together?”
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
“Why do they move and other things don’t?” Right? And so, our unit quickly evolved
and it even changed in terms of when I would write it down on the schedule. I used
to write “Electricity” and I started writing “Physics”. Because it just changed …
Female:
Yeah.
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Male:
… kind of into a unit about physics. But it was, it was my job, I think, wanting to
identify that.
Female:
Yeah.
Male:
To see that this is what they need to understand.
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
That they are trying to understand something at this level and they can’t and here’s
the piece that they need added in. Then I needed to try to find resources …
Female:
Exactly.
Male:
… to help them understand that.
Female:
Yeah.
Male:
I needed to find things for them to read, things for them to look at, things for them to
try, right? All those things. And then, because it’s a complex topic, I needed to help
them with all of those steps, right? So, you know, you can give a child something, a
book or an article or something that says, you know …
Female:
Right.
Male:
“What is an atom?” Right? But at Grade 6, they’re not just going to absorb that in its
entirety, right? They’re going to need help from a teacher, from a community of
people who are able to help them …
Male:
Mm.
Male:
… with those reading comprehension tasks and, and, you know, deciphering that
and making sense of it. And then they’ll—the child who’s read that, will need help to
make that understandable to everyone else in the room too.
Female:
To everybody else.
Male:
So, you know, I think there’s, there’s so much of a role for the teacher to play all the
way through.
Female:
Huge.
Male:
And …
Female:
Constantly anticipating the resources that they’re going to need.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Male:
Yeah.
Female:
The experiences that they’re going to need. And I always think of it too as that kind
of, like, scooping back in, that, you know, that child’s [sic] that’s gone down, down
this route …
Male:
Mm-hm.
Page 2 of 8
Female:
And it’s great, what they’re doing is fantastic. And they’re totally into it. But you also
want to bring them back, so that they understand that part of their responsibility is to
share that back with the group.
Male:
Yeah.
Female:
It is to bring it back. And so, you—the, the, the body gets kind of bigger and bigger
here as you just are constantly …
Male:
Yeah.
Female:
… grappling everything back towards, towards the centre.
Male:
I think that’s, that’s, like, that’s an expectation of, I think, every classroom here, right?
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
That, that, that your work, your learning is not just yours.
Female:
Yours. Yeah.
Male:
And it’s not between you and the teacher. So if you’re presenting, if you’re sharing
something …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
You’re not sharing it or presenting it just to tell the teacher what you know.
Female:
Right.
Male:
You’re presenting it to everyone, to help everyone understand …
Female:
Yeah.
Male:
… what you know. Or to help everyone understand what they know even better, or
from a different angle. And I think that’s, that’s probably where the assessment bit
comes in. And, you know, as, as a Grade 5 and 6 teacher, right …
Male:
Mm-hm.
Male:
You know, the assessment becomes kind of a heavy issue. But I think—so, you
know, certainly I use, at times, you know, all the kind of traditional assessments that
…
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
… that one would use. But I think, you know, I think traditional assessments, you
know, they tend to come from, you know, this situation where the student would sit
there quietly, receive information …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
And then, it was, it was like putting something into a black box, or something. And
then you’d have to devise some method to pull back the curtain on the box …
Page 3 of 8
Male:
Yeah.
Male:
And see what the child actually knows.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
Right.
Male:
Right? So you would give them a test or you would, you know, have them do an
interview or a presentation or something like that. But when your classroom is a
different kind of place, and when, like you said, there’s just a wash of ideas and
children’s thinking coming out at every moment of the day, right?
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
[04:56] When, when, you know, a child comes in for a 90 minute session in science,
and in that time they’re going to, you know, propose a new idea to work on, they’re
going to do some research, then they’re going to report on that to the—another
group of people or something like that, and, you know, start doing experiment, right?
You have from every child this sort of outpouring of indications, of evidence, about
what they understand and what they don’t …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
And what they’re interested in and what they’re capable of.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
Yeah.
Male:
That, you know, honestly just, you know, just trying to log some of that down and
keep up with it is the daunting task, right? You’re not in the situation, I think, where
you are in a traditional classroom of having a deficit of information about what
children know.
Male:
Mm-hm. Definitely. It’s the opposite.
Female:
Yeah.
Male:
It’s the opposite. You have an enormous surplus.
Female:
So much information.
Male:
Yeah.
Male:
And it’s just a matter of trying …
Male:
Yeah.
Male:
… to capture it in its entirety …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
And put that into the three lines of your report card …
Page 4 of 8
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
… or something like that. But it’s ...
Male:
You know, but there’s so much information and it’s just there for the taking when,
when your, your classroom is the place where children are expressing at all times
what they’re thinking and what they’re capable of.
Male:
John Dewey talks about how we never teach through direct transmission, but by
creating experiences all along the way. You’re, you’re listening to what the children
need and design—finding the resources or creating those experiences. You were
also—when you talked about, you know, the preconceptions that children come with.
You had them draw their ideas of what space would look like …
Female:
Mm.
Male:
… or the earth would look like. All of that is formative assessment. But it’s also, you
know—the brain research is showing us that, that’s when learning—the, the brain is
fully engaged in learning, because we need to understand what children understand
before we can give them new information …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
… and new experiences. And then, this idea of—both of you are getting the children
to learn in the way that the discipline is practiced. They are acting—they are
scientists. They’re not learning about science, but they are scientists. They are
creating theories, they are asking questions, researching those ideas. The ideas are
evolving. The theories evolve. And they understand that. And, you know, your idea
of metaphors, you know … Often we have children—we, we sort of unfortunately
teach children that there’s sort of a, a bucket of information in, in a certain topic and
at some point, by the end of the unit, the bucket is empty. We know everything there
is to know …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
… about that subject. And that isn’t the case in, you know—not with our four and five
year olds …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
And not with our older children. The children understand that they have acquired
incredible understanding because you’ve been documenting all the way, beginning
with those early drawings or the, the early experimentation and maybe posters that
they made with electricity. But then they can see how much they have learned and
so there’s a lot of self-assessment there. The children can take this sort of metaview of where they started and where they …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
… where they’ve accomplished. And the questions they never got to, which is fine.
But, I, I wanted to end with this idea of the collective understanding, that it, it sort of
becomes this community’s job. And your idea of ringing them in, that … I think the
role of a teacher—I used to say, you know, it’s important to have a hands-on
Page 5 of 8
experience. But now I, I’ve changed that because constructivism doesn’t just mean
doing.
[08:24] It means doing—it, it means hands-on and minds-on.
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
And that, I think, is the role of the teacher, is bringing it back to the questions we’ve
identified as a group. Or the, you know, the purpose we’ve identified and … The
teacher is bringing that together so that everyone has a sense. And of course,
children will have—some children will have deeper and some children will have a
different understanding of …
Female:
Mm-hm.
Male:
But we—it becomes the responsibility of the group …
Male:
Mm-hm(?).
Male:
… to identify what is it? What are the key ideas everybody should understand?
Male:
Yeah.
Female:
Absolutely. And I think if you go into a classroom where that’s really being
embodied, you see it. You feel it as soon as you’re walking in the door. You don’t
see, in our case, 22 kids doing exactly the same thing.
Male:
Yeah, good point. Yeah. Yeah.
Female:
You see children doing very different things. When I walk upstairs towards the
Grade 5/6 class, I’m often having to get out of the way of the kids who are working
on the stairs in a small clutch. They’re not even in the classroom. But because
they’re so motivated and engaged and doing their own thing …
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
Ben knows he can let them out the door.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
And they’re going to be working and they’re going to be bringing things back.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
You get this incredible hum of energy from it. But also when you walk in the room,
you see it everywhere. When, like, electricity was going on in Ben’s class, there
were bits and pieces of things all over the place.
Male:
Yeah.
Female:
And the kids could kind of get up and tinker with them.
Male:
Yeah.
Page 6 of 8
Female:
When they suddenly had an idea or question. And it—maybe it wa—maybe it
happened in the middle of a math lesson, when suddenly somebody got really, really
excited about an idea, and Ben probably wouldn’t say, you know, “Okay, we’re going
to stop math right now and tackle this.” But he is going to say, “That’s a really great
question, and we’re going to come back to it. But right now we’re going to go on with
the math.”
Male:
Yeah.
Female:
But it’s all there for the kids to see.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
And also their work is all there.
Male:
Yeah.
Female:
And so, when parents walk into the class, when other teachers walk into the class
and when the children themselves walk in, everything that’s happening is there for
them to see that the journey is available for them to track themselves.
Male:
Yeah.
Male:
Yeah.
Female:
And my kids stand so often in front of the work that they’ve done. Huge amount of
writing, because they’re interested in what they’re writing about.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
Yes, they do want you to know how far their wind machine went the first time
compared to how far it went the second time and how much better it was.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
And then they go up there and they’re constantly looking at it.
their own …
Male:
Yeah.
Female:
They’re looking at others.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
They’re having conversations about, “If I do this again, I’m going to change it this
way.” And it becomes outside of what the teacher has done. It’s a huge—I mean,
the teacher is still an enormous part of all of that. But it takes on a life of its own.
Male:
Mm-hm. Yeah.
Female:
And the teacher is one member of that community.
Male:
Mm-hm.
Female:
Not the leader of that community.
They’re looking at
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Male:
And I, I …
[END OF RECORDING – length, 11:01]
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