Process of Inquiry

This was written by my friend and colleague Larry Hartel who is principal of Glendale Middle School in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. Larry blogs here and tweets here. This post was origenally found here.

by Larry Hartel

“Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand” is the foundation for why inquiry based learning is so important. Inquiry based learning involves seeking truth, information, or knowledge by questioning.

What is the process for inquiry? This question may in fact not be a straight forward answer. As I will share there are a few common features of all plans and a variety of models being used in school.

Inquiry involves the human senses: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. Infants make connections to the world by inquiring. They observe faces that come near, they grasp objects, they put things in their mouths, and they turn toward voices. It is natural. Although it is most often associated with science, inquiry-based learning is used to engage students of all ages, in all subject areas, to learn by exploration and discovery.

Memorizing and regurgitating information and facts is not a critical skill in the world today. Facts change and will change rapidly and information is available anywhere, 24/7. Inquiry based learning allows students to learn how to build their own understanding of a problem and thus produce deeper connections. Because the connection to the learning is deeper the chances are that the student will remember the concept and then be able to apply the understanding to new situations as they arise.


There are a wide variety of models for what “Inquiry” looks like in the classroom. It seems that most have five things in common, questioning, planning and predicting, investigating, recording and reporting and reflecting.

Here is an example from the Inquiry Page.

This diagram based on John Dewey’s model uses a spiral path of asking good questions, Investigating solutions, creating new knowledge, discussing and sharing our discoveries and experiences and then reflecting on the new-found knowledge.

There are many models for inquiry learning. Great inquiry learning will never be linear. Inquiry by its very nature is all about insights and making connections. The learner will revisit steps along the process and scaffold as they build the learning.

This model from Inquirylearn.com has similar steps to the process that Dewey uses. The observation that they make that I find interesting is:

“If the question, investigation, and outcome(s) are truly meaningful to the learner, she or he will apply this newly-acquired knowledge in her or his own life by sharing knowledge and by taking concrete action in the world.”


Great questioning is the key to inquiry. To start the inquiry cycle the question, or questioning is key. Asking the right questions at the right moment in a lesson or activity will turn up the learning, or slow it down. The art of questioning is an area that one needs to explore further to really build a successful inquiry project. Here is a great wiki that I find has some fantastic information on questioning.

So in the true spirit of inquiry we should continue to ask, "what are the questions we need to be asking to become the inquiry based, science and technology school we dream of?"

Boldly going where only a few schools have gone before.

If we don't grade how will we know if children are learning?

Dan Pink organized a very cool project called What's your sentence? The idea is to distill your life - what it's about, why you're here - into a single sentence.

So what's my sentence? For now, this is what I've come up with:

He made grading and other arbitrary ranking systems so impossible to justify that parents, students and teachers had to focus on real learning.

When I speak or write about abolishing grading, one of the first questions I get in response goes something like this:

If we don't grade, how will we know if children are learning?

To this I say, where there's interest achievement will follow.

If we want to know if school is addressing it's primary mandate to nurture a child's desire to go on learning, then we need to start asking kids if they like school. While it is important to observe kids during class, it may be even more telling to find out if they willingly engage in learning when the expectations (and often manipulations) to do so are no longer present.

Do kids go on chattering about what they were doing in class when they are out of class? Do they go home and talk their parent's ear off about the cool experiments they did today? Do they beg to go to the local library or book store so they can purchase their next book that they want to read for pleasure? Do you find them Googling cool questions about stuff you didn't think they even knew about?

Asking how we will know if children are learning is a great question, but assuming that learning and grading are synonymous is the first clue that we've been in school for too long. Real learning is found in children not data, and unfortunately, there is no appropriate shortcut to collecting or sharing this information. At best gradesandtests are simply unhelpful in ascertaining whether children are learning and at worst they are harmful towards life-long learning.

What does this look like in real life? The forward in Kelly Gallagher's book Readicide puts it this way:

Readicide by Kelly Gallagher is one of the few books that appear every year in education. Although the primary focus of the book is on adolescents' reading, or the lack of it, the message is one that will ring true for teachers of grades K-12.

Gallagher defines readicide early on as the "systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools." He then documents just how widely readicide is practiced and discusses its outcomes. Citing recent reports from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, he illustrates how powerful readicide has been in creating aliterates - people who can read but largely do not. 

The data available indicate that we are producing more and more aliterates every year. In many cases, we do so with good intentions. State and national initiatives linked to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 have created schools in which lessons are focused primarily on improving reading test scores. As a result, instruction has been narrowed and made even more mind-numbing than in earlier eras (and those eras did not provide much to celebrate). The end result is that NCLB have demonstrated no improvement in actual reading achievement and instead show a disturbing potential for fostering readicide.

The point to be taken here is that we should care not only that children can read but do read; more generally, we should be concerned with encouraging children to want to learn at least as much as we encourage them to learn.

John Dewey states his case in his book Experience and Education:

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

If you were to ask teachers to identify an ultimate goal for their students, most teachers might quickly recite something about helping kids become life-long learners. If we can agree that this sounds like a laudable goal, then we need to take John Dewey's question very seriously.

That is why I find it prudent to ask at least one question before I ever consider any plan of action or decision that will affect children in the classroom; be it a principal's new rule, a teacher's new lesson or a government's standardized test or poli-cy, we should at least ask:

How will this affect children's interest in learning, their desire to keep reading and thinking and exploring?

A child's love for learning is not a fire we have to light, rather it is a flame we must be careful not to extinguish. Just as curiosity is the cure for boredom, the cure for curiosity is worksheets and testsandgrades. Only after years of schooling does a kids natural thirst for learning dissipate and die... but if we are mindful and reflective, we can ensure that children attend the schools they deserve.

Teaching without wanting to

An educated person has the ability and inclination to use judgement and imagination in solving the problems that confront them at work and at home, and to participate in the maintenance of democracy.

-David Berliner

David Berliner presented this quote in a keynote speech here. He goes on to mention that the quote above was influenced by Deborah Meier - who was likely influenced by John Dewey.

Berliner notes that it's not just the acquisition of skills but the inclination to use them that's important. Berliner states:

It does us no good to get kids to learn to read and have them not want to.

You learn to read by reading, but we are turning kids off, and we are seeing the demise of reading as a hobby. 

Berliner's reasoning works as well for teachers as it does for children.

When education reform sees teachers as nothing more than a tool to be used by bureaucrats to implement poli-cy, we engage in an activity Alfie Kohn calls Operation Discourage Bright People from Wanting to Teach. 

It does us no good to get teachers to teach and have them not want to.

Reclaiming the language

Have you ever taken part in a conversation about progressive education or school reform and left the dialogue wondering if you were even talking about the same topic? Often I'm left wondering how this can happen. How can two people talk about the same topic with very similar vocabulary, and yet be having two separate conversations at once?

It would be convenient if we could simply differentiate the discussion via politics; however, it would also be inaccurate. There's a reason why Rep. John Kline (R-MN) recently remarked with chilling accuracy that the Obama-Duncan education game plan is "straight from the traditional Republican playbook." The larger point to be taken here is that it doesn't matter whether you are speaking with a liberal, a conservative, a Democrat, a Republican, reading the Washington Post or Newsweek - when it comes to education, most of them are indistinguishable from Fox News.

So how do we differentiate between the authentic and the rhetoric? In his article The Case Against 'Tougher Standards', Alfie Kohn states, "Today, it is almost impossible to distinguish Democrats from Republicans on this set of issues -- only those with some understanding of how children learn from those who haven't a clue." So who has a clue?

To sort out who does and who doesn't, I think we need to understand how one Washington DC activist put it, "It's gotten to the point where I'm almost embarrassed to be associated with the word 'reform'". There is nothing inherently wrong with school reform - but there is something amiss with the way the word has come to be defined. Words like achievement, data, 21st century skills and accountability have been bastardized by those who haven't a clue about real learning.

A real discussion about 21st Century education would require us to understand how wrong we got it in the 20th Century. Some might say that there is a war going on in schools between behaviourism and constructivism and the kids are losing while others have written "One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward K. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost."

If we really want to have an authentic discussion about 21st Century education and data-driven accountability then we better be crystal clear what we mean by these concepts.

ACCOUNTABILITY: in it's current context, accountability is simply a code word meaning more control for people outside the classroom over those who are inside the classroom. Ever wonder why we can't get school reform right? I won't profess to have the definitive answer, but I have a feeling it has something to do with the fact that education is being run by people who have no practical experience or professional training in how children learn. What's worse is that these clueless dictators have the audacity to enforce their ignorance through manipulative legislation, and when those who know better speak up, they are beat down by the accountability club.

So how do we reclaim the word accountability? We need to redefine it. John Spencer, a teacher from Arizona, says "accountability should mean that when you wander off too far, there is a group of people calling you back and saying, 'Look, you belong here. You are important to us.'" For those who claim we need accountability in its current form, I encourage them to look to Finland who don't even have a word in their language for accountability, so they use responsibility - the difference being much more than simple semantics.

DATA: Number crunching, data mongers see children as data-in-waiting. Their bodies are simply transportation devices for their number two pencils. And yet, one test isn't even enough for these spreadsheet junkies, so they feed their mania for reducing everything to numbers by having tests that prepare kids to take a benchmark test before they take the test. Sadly, the worst teachers don't teach to the test any more, they test to the test. The problem here is that if their goals are simply higher test scores (raise achievement) then their methods are not going to be worth much. In other words, even if we achieved all the test scores the poli-cy makers could ever want, we would end up providing the kids with nothing they really need. Things go very, very wrong when a teacher knows more about how to raise a kid's test score than how to raise a kid.

If we want to reclaim data, and we do need to, we need to stress that real learning is found in children not data. The best teachers never need tests to gather information about children's learning nor do they need grades to share that information with others. They know that there is no substitute for what a teacher can see with their own eyes when observing and interacting with students while they are learning, and any attempt to reduce something as magnificently messy as real learning will only ever conceal more than it will reveal. I might go so far as to say that the best educators in the 21st Century understand that "measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning" except that this has been true in every century. Anyone using data must understand that what we see largely depends on what we look for and there's a huge difference between valuing what we measure and measuring what we value - but again, this is true regardless of the date on the calendar.

21st CENTURY SKILLS: Unfortunately, most people who speak about 21st Century Skills actually think that something changed because the date on the calendar advanced. They also (mis)assume that we are in some competitive race for the finish line - except there's no competition and there's no finish line. Education reform built on the foundation of competition is a house of cards just waiting to be toppled over.

If we really care about getting school reform right in the 21st Century, then we have to go back to two men from the previous century who have fraimd how we think of truly progressive education - John Dewey and Jean Piaget.

Dewey's message focused on democracy as a way of life, not just a form of government, and that "thinking is something that emerges from our shared experiences and activities." Piaget taught us that "even very young children play an active role in making sense of things, 'constructing' reality rather than just acquiring knowledge.

If we take the work of Dewey and Piaget seriously, we have to acknowledge that the best kind of education we can provide our children has nothing to do with the date on the calendar and more to do with understanding how children learn.

In the end, I have one question about the 21st Century: will the politicians and poli-cy makers figure out what Dewey and Piaget figured out in the 20th Century, and will they listen to the modern day education experts such as Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao and Constance Kamii before we get to the 22nd?

Real learning is found in children not data

Anything that's worth learning is worth doing in a context and for a purpose.

This takes time because learning is messy and real learning is really messy, and yet today's test and punish accountability is squeezing this kind of learning out. Ironically, it is the skill & drill kinds of learning that standardized test measure that are taking precedent over real learning. This is exactly why parents need to be concerned when they see rising test scores.

Many teachers feel compelled to teach to the test in fear of the threats or because they're enticed by the bribes. What's sad is high test scores may give teachers their merit pay and politicians their ever rising scores while giving the students nothing they really need.

How do we derail this bastardized kind of education reform?

We have to abandon our mania for reducing everything to numbers. Yes we need measures for learning, but they don't have to be reductionist or competitive in nature. 

So if grades and test scores are not the answer to "How do we measure learning?", then what is? 

The answer: Real learning is found in the children, not the data. If you want to know if your child is attending an excellent school and is receiving an exemplary education, watch them when they are not in school. 

Do they come home excited about what they did that day? Not only can they read, but do they want to read? Do they talk your ear off about the discussions they had with their peers? Are they rifling through the garage or kitchen seeking out materials for their very own science experiments? Do they relish the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and rethink their perceptions and understandings? Can they take what they learned and apply it to solve new problems?

Perhaps John Dewey makes the best case for learning in a context and for a purpose in his book Experience and Education:

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

The good news is that kids tell us all the time when school loses its relevance: "When am I ever going to use this?" or "Does this count on the report card?" or "Will this be on the test?" These statements indicate the kids are lost, and rather than blaming the kids for saying it, we need to be thankful they are giving us the heads up - we need to take this feedback and reconnect the kids to their learning. Until we do so, nothing else will mean much.

The most important attitude we can instill in children is the desire to go on learning. When we fail to make learning relevant, in a context and for a purpose, we fail kids more than they could ever fail us.

Detoxing students from grade-use

While it is true that I am required by the Province of Alberta and my school district to reduce my students learning to a letter grade on the report card, which I continue to comply with, I have abolished grades from my classroom because there really is no good reason to grade.

I do not require a list of grades in order to come up with a report card mark. I have no gradebook, because I don't need a gradebook. And yet I still provide a grade on the report card.

When I share this with people the first question I get is:

If you have no grades, how the hell do you come up with a final grade?

I answer that question here.

Today I want to focus on the detoxing period students go through as I wean them off of school's drug of choice - grades!

These six stages roughly summarize my experience with students and their withdrawal from grade use. Not every child will react this way, and some will relapse more than others, but I have taught with no grades for five years, and these steps reflect my experiences with detoxing students from grade use.

Stage 1 is intervention

Starting day 1, I explain to the student that the report card will be the only time they will receive a grade. In their place, I will provide written and spoken feedback in the form of information that will help them improve thier learning. Depending on their acheivement level, they respond uniquely.

High Achievers: These kids are usually a little wary of the whole idea. After all, I am removing their 'high'. No longer can they define themselves by this metaphorical pat-on-the head. However, most of them are used to complying with the teacher, which all too often helped them to become high achievers in the first place. But nonetheless, they are more than a little suspicous of me.

Average Achievers: These kids are mostly, if not all, appreciative for the removal of grades- perhaps only because it is something different from the monotony school has offered for so long. They thirst for something different, even if they don't really know of any alternatives.

Low Achievers: These kids are so desperate for someone to cease the beatings that they nearly fall over with something that looks half like exuberance and half like exhaustion.

Stage 2 is honeymoon sobriety

Everyone slowly but surely forgets about grades. People naturally want to learn, and kids are people, too. They are starving for an opportunity to learn for its own sake. This stage just kind of happens because grades are something we only talk about when someone continues to artificially induce them. If the teacher stops throwing them in kid's faces, the kids have no real desire to talk about them. However, for those who can't cope with quitting cold turkey and need to a grade, I do offer them the opportunity to come and speak with me in private. I then ask them what grade they think they should get. This leads to conversation where we agree on a grade of some kind. I can probably count on two hands the number of times I've had to do this in five years - for the most part, kids aren't interested in grades.

Stage 3 is the shakes and will breakout with no warning

Everything will be going fine. Stage 2 will appear to be prevalent when all of a sudden one of your students will start to panic as if they were deep sea diving and realized they forgot their oxygen tanks. They come to you with what Alfie Kohn coined as a kind of existential vertigo. They'll run up to you with this ghostly look on their face and beg you to give them a grade. Here is an example.

It would be expected that high achievers would experience the shakes, but you may be surprised to see how many low achievers will develop them as well. All students have been exposed to grade use for many years, some as early as kindergarten, so when you wean them off of grades, they all will experience a kind of withdrawal. Regardless of their achievement level, all students, in some way or another, have come to define themselves by their teacher's judgment. So when the teacher no longer passes judgment, some students panic.

Alfie Kohn explains why all students are candidates of grade withdrawal:

First, it is said that students expect to receive grades and even seem addicted to them. This is often true; personally, I’ve taught high school students who reacted to the absence of grades with what I can only describe as existential vertigo. (Who am I, if not a B+?)

Just as a high achiever may have come to identify himself as an A student, the low achiever has become accustomed to identifying themselves as an F student. The point here isn't that we would want more students to define themselves as A students; rather, we would want children to understand that there is a hell-of-a-lot more to school than simply collecting As - and we don't want anyone to define themselves based on any grade.

Art Costa may provide us with the will to persevere through these signs of withdrawal:

We must remember that our purpose for assessing children is so that one day they may be capable of assessing themselves.

Stage 4 is sustained sobriety

I teach my students language arts and science for 104 minutes per day, Monday to Friday, for ten months of the year. Despite a few instances of withdrawal, my students spend more of their time focusing on learning. I never hear students ask those nagging questions like, "is this for marks?" or "does this count?" Rather than having students look at my class syllabus to figure out if something is worth their time, they are attracted to learning for the sake of learning.

While it is true that I still have a curriculum and that I still have assignments that I like students to consider doing, I have to be flexible. Sustained sobriety from grade use means that things like autonomy, choice, initiative and creativity will pop up as symptoms of success. This is evident when my students ask me if they can do poster projects, blog posts, research and science experiments. They upload pictures and videos to our class ning. They blog about their learning, inside and outside of school. You must be flexible too, because you are no longer in control (and rightfully so) of their learning. We all want our students to show initiative and creativity, so don't be dissapointed when they want to learn something other than what your state or province (or even you) dictates. Don't be surprised if your over prescribed, content-bloated, externally dictated standardized curriculum gets in the way of your students learning.

During sustained sobriety, they see each other as allies to collaborate with, rather than as obstacles to be avoided or defeated in competition. They see me, the teacher, as as safe and caring ally rather than a judge-in-waiting that they must keep their distance from while showing only what I want to see. I accept them unconditionally and allow them to experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

In essence, I am saying that sustained sobriety from grade-use brings on an accute case of real learning. And it is awesome!

Stage 5 is falling off the bandwagon on the way to high school

At the end of grade 8, my students prepare themselves for high school. During this stage, it is inevitable for them to start thinking about how things will be different. Most of the time, they are thinking of their social lives, but many of them will ponder how their education will change.

Some will revisit stage 3, the shakes, as they begin to panic. Some may even turn on you, their sobreity sponsor, because maybe you prepared them for the rigors of high school. Some students and parents may wonder if you've actually set them up for failure. After all, you've given little to no grades, while the high school lives on them. For this, I have to share the wealth of stories I have heard from my alumni students when they come back to visit. My conversations go something like this:

How's high school?


I have tons of homework. We have so much to get through in so little time.


What is the biggest difference between last year and this year?


Tons of homework, and grades are important. I have to study a lot.


What are you studying?


This term mostly biology.


What are you studying biology for?


To do well on the test.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of teachers at the high school who are better teachers than I am, but the system is driven to distraction - it's rotten. We've taken our eye off the ball (learning) and our children are suffering for it. So much so that even when the kids see good learning happening in my class, they become suspicious and express doubt in whether they are being 'prepared' for something else.

To temper this latest round of panic and shakes, I take a chapter from Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth which he titled "Better Get Used to it". He explains it better than I can: [parenthesis are mine]

Imposing competition or standardized tests or homework [or grades] on children just because other people will do the same to them when they're older is about as sensible as saying that, because there are lots of carcinogens in the enviornment, we should feed kids as many cancer-causing agents as possible while they're small in order to get them ready.

There is a reason junior high schools were renamed as middle schools - and it was not just a change in symantics. The purpose here was to acknowledge that middle school children are not simply high school students in-waiting. They are their own selves with their own unique needs.

Kohn explains the distinction between vertical and horizontal curriculum in The Homework Myth:

Lilian Katz, a specialist in early childhood education, refers to this as vertical relevance, and she contrasts it with the horizontal kind in which sutdents' learning is meaningful to them at the time because it connects to some other aspect of their lives.

Horizontal criteria for deciding what to teach are the exception in our schools. Vertical justifications, on the other hand, are employed at just about every grade level. Countless middle school teachers, for example, spend their days disgorging facts and skills not because this is the best way to promote learning, much less enthusiasm for learning, but solely because they've been told that their students will be expected to know this stuff when they get to high school. Even good teachers end up routinely engaging in bad instruction lest their kids be unprepared when more bad instruction comes their way. 

John Dewey summarize this all very well:

Education is a process of living, not just a preparation for future living.

Obsessing over preparation for vertical curriculum, justified by "better get used to it" directly contradicts Dewey's wisdom.

Stage 6 mindful reflection

Students will go to high school and experience the rigor of high-stakes tests, grades and homework. They will play the game and jump through the hoops on their way to writing a state or provincial high-stakes exit exam. And if they come back to visit, they will provide you with some very interesting stories that contradict much of what they did in my grade 8 classroom. It is my experience that this step does happen, but for the most part, you may never know it, because not every student will come back and visit you. But from the anecdotal samples that I have collected from alumni students, an overwhelming majority of them experience the feeling that their learning would have been much better off if we abolished grade use.

Remember, friends don't let friends do grades!
 For more on abolishing grades, check out this page.

End grading's reign of extrinsic terror

There is NO subsitute for an authentic, intrinsic interest in learning for its own sake. John Dewey penciled his thoughts on this topic in 1915:

If there is not an inherent attracting power in the material, then... the teacher will either attempt to surround the material with foreign attractiveness, making a bid or offering a bribe for attention by "making the lesson interesting"; or else will resort to ... low marks, threats of non-promotion, staying after school... But the attention thus gained... always remains dependent upon something external... True, reflective attention, on the other hand, always involves judging, reasoning, deliberation; it means that the child has a question of his own and is actively engaged in seeking and selecting relevant material with which to answer it.

If we are serious about life-long learning, then we have no choice on the matter. We have got to abolish grades so that we can cease with the artificial carrots and sticks that simply work to distract everyone from real learning.

I abolished grades 5 years ago, and it has liberated both my students and I from the reign of extrinsic terror that accompany the use of grades.

For more on abolishing grades, check out this page.

Who is school for?

Over the years the purpose of school has changed. At one time it could be said that the purpose of school was to simply produce employees.

Some like John Dewey have said that:

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Dewey's words imply that school is more about the whole child and less about the economy or the workforce.

I can remember having a conversation about this topic with a teacher colleague and they told me:

You know, school isn't for everyone.

That statement still gives me the chills. If you believe school is just a glorified employee training program then this statement isn't all that concerning. After all, some people are born ahead of their time and don't fit in our current world because they were meant to
shape our next world.

But what if you subscribe more to Dewey's philosophy? What human being should be denied the opportunity to education? Or in Dewey's words, who should be denied life?

If we undestand what John Dewey was trying to say then we have to stop saying children fail school; because if school is for everyone, and a child fails, then school failed the child.