[MUSIC] Welcome back. In this section, this lecture, what we're going to do is we're going to begin to explore the Spiral of Inquiry framework. A framework that we think is - and have seen - as incredibly useful. And a framework that has really emerged from networks of teachers around the world thinking together in collaborative ways that make a difference to young people. Let's start by actually looking at the image - so, if you focus the screen and actually look at the design of the spiral, I think the first thing that you will notice is that it moves around. The designer is actually a woman who both teaches design and does design for a living. And one of the things that she noticed in her own inquiry work, as a designer, is that it can be tiring to do the intellectual work of inquiry, of design, and that sometimes - even though we're very involved in the process - we need a bit of a break. So, you'll notice as you look at the Spiral, that there is a bit of curve in it part way through, and she suggested - and we agree with her - that sometimes you need to take a little time just to breathe and relax. It's not a forced march through six stages. So, that's the first thing, to just keep the image itself of the Spiral in our minds. Perhaps the second thing to say about the Spiral is that although it's organised into six stages, for the purposes of understanding each stage and the unique things that are asked at that stage, it is interconnected. It's like the stages of a writing process, the stages of design. These things are interconnected. So, we're going to talk about scanning as the first stage in the process, but in fact sometimes you start by checking things out and looking at some evidence or some observations and then that takes you to scanning more broadly. You have to think about these stages as interconnected, not as discrete and standalone stages - although conceptually it's easier, I think, for most of us to learn it that way. So, it's got a flow to it, the image is supposed to suggest that it's ongoing work, it's not a neat, tidy process where you say "There, I've got that done". It is designed to be something that can be used over time and we've actually seen school staffs that have taken these ideas and worked, in a pretty focused way, over a period of two or three or four or five years, and they are schools in which it truly is, you could say, a learning community - an inquiry based learning community where they're getting real gains for learners. So, let's think about it as recursive, let's think about it as a design process and let's think about it as a time when - you know, even between each stage - where we need to take a break and to think about whether this is the right time to move on or whether this is a time to kind of relax into the process a little bit. Having said that - the three questions that are always-- that are on the screen that you can read for yourself, are critically important at every single stage of the Spiral of Inquiry process. And that is - we're always asking ourselves, "What's going on for learners?" And those learners are the young people that we're working with, but if we're working with colleagues, it's also kind of "What's going on with us?" So, you can conceptualise this as for learners of all ages and stages. How do we know what's going on? So, what evidence sources are we using so that we're always evidence-seeking - not data-driven, but but looking actively for evidence to inform our thinking. And then, always asking ourselves, "Why does this matter? Is this important enough to pay our attention to?" Because getting the grain size, getting the issue or the focus that really matters the most and that we can do something about is critically important to our sense of confidence as educators and our desire to make the world a better place for young people and for everybody. So, let's just look now in a very brief way - so that we have a shared understanding - at the six stages, remembering that it's interconnected. Scanning is the first stage where we usually start in this process and as you can tell from the word itself - it's a broad look, and we will look at more detail at this process later on. Focusing - again, as you can tell from the word itself, is more a very close look at one thing where we're going to put our energy and where we've decided that really this is a place that we can really advance the work collectively if we share an intense and focused interest in it. The third stage, which we're very fond of, is developing a set of hunches that both, kind of, test out some of our assumptions but also just the process of thinking about hunch and intuition as an important part of the thinking process rather than antithetical to real thinking, we have found that the educators with whom we work and have found ourselves that valuing that process is a really powerful thing in moving learning forward. The next stage that, again, comes from-- particularly from some of the insights that Dr. Helen Timperley got in her research where she found that often professional learning wasn't tied to student learning and it seemed to be interesting that when you're studying professional learning you would want medical practitioners, when they're learning things, to do things that were helpful to those of us who are their patients. I think as educators, most of the time we're hoping that people are doing their new professional learning around things that really will help young people move their learning forward. And then - you know, this maybe feeling like a delayed process, I think it is more of a systemic process - but then, of course we're going to take we hope are highly informed actions, because we've thought about these other aspects and we've allowed ourselves to be broad and then focused and then made some hypotheses, done some new learning together so that we really feel well-equipped to make the changes in our classroom practices and that's the tie, the link in to planning. Then taking action collectively, we love the lesson design work of some of the Asian cultures where people collectively take on a challenge of designing things together and testing it out. And then, really checking - and there the key word in the checking stage is what we've taken as our focus and what we've done our new professional learning around and made some guesses around, is it making enough of a difference? Because there are a lot of things that we could put our energy into and I think at the checking stage, the evidence-seeking stage, we want to ask ourselves, "Is this the place that is making enough of a difference?" Because, you know, the needs today in our diverse classrooms and in the world call out for making sure that we're choosing the strategies that we're pretty sure are the most powerful for young people. You know, one of the things at the checking stage that we really want to remember is that this isn't the end. Otherwise, it would just be a circle and it would be done and a discrete process, and that's not how we think about it at all, that's not how we experience it in the reality of our own teaching and our teaching colleagues. I think, you know, you'll notice that there's that pausing approach in the image itself but here's the place where we ask ourselves, based on our answer to the question, "Have we made enough of a difference?" we think about, "Alright, what next? Should we persevere with this focus for a second year?" Because some of the things that are challenging, like getting secondary students to be intellectually engaged, we may not accomplish in just one year of teamwork effort, it may take longer and we want to spend some time on it and this is the point where we revisit the question, "What next?" Let's do some rescanning and perhaps we can move through the Spiral at about the same speed, because we've had a year of experience, but it absolutely is a spiral, a spiral that in some cases takes us to greater depth, and in some cases takes us to a broader expanse. Because we've had some success with working on students owning their own learning, now we've decided we've got the confidence collectively as a collaborative group to say "What if we explore powerful ways of allowing individual student interest to drive more of what we're doing. Let's figure out how to build that into the day and have it be really successful for young people so that they have a chance to, in this century world, to explore things that they find really fascinating in greater depth as part of their learning day and their learning lives. It's important at the checking stage to realise that this is a spiral and we're going to think about how we can move from checking back into scanning and revisit the Spiral process over time. And to help us do that over the next three lectures, we will be looking at each of these stages in slighter greater depth, so that we can have a real understanding of how this operates in our professional planning. [MUSIC]
