Should inquiry be main course, side or dessert for secondary English students?

My tendency is to go for learning to drive or painting analogies when expressing new education ideas so please bear with the culinary comparisons.

I attended a meeting recently in which teachers of secondary disciplines were asked to begin new units with students explicitly inquiring into key and/or disciplinary concepts of the given scheme of work. In addition, there was the encouragement to let them own their final outcome by enabling research, experimentation and refinement of a personally chosen assessment type.

These suggestions are seemingly faithful to the IB’s philosophy, with the MYP Principles into Practice explaining that departments should be “encouraging authentic performances of understanding that call for critical and creative thinking.”

Additionally, the document deems teaching with inquiry to be the belief that:

prior knowledge and experience establish the basis for new learning, and students’ own curiosity, together with careful curriculum design, provide the most effective stimulus for learning that is engaging, relevant, challenging and significant.

It is my observation that the interpretation of these two requirements, as well as many others in the same document and related literature, have led to lethal mutations in the IB’s Middle Years Programme, which in some cases are mushrooming further and further away from the feasibility of long-term learning.

The mushroom

Is “prior knowledge and experience” the result of a carefully planned, progressional model of curriculum or is it idiosyncratic knowledge gained from outside school that will differ from child to child?

Is “student curiosity” the product of teachers presenting novel information in an engaging way and allowing students to choose a specific topic therein or is it allowing them to pursue any line of investigation on any particular topic that they have a standing interest in?

“Careful curriculum design” is so vague as to be unnerving. When would teachers not engage in careful curriculum design, whatever their philosophical stance? I am almost tempted to read this as a panacea statement that will absolve all sins of a failed unit by simply stating that the tasks, however deeply inquiry led, should have been more ‘carefully designed’.

The central tension between schools, departments and individuals when discussing this stuff is defining what exactly is meant by inquiry and deciding the EXTENT to which this plays any role at all in a scheme of learning.

Often, this interpretation is initially framed by an external provider, a workshop leader perhaps. Although well-meaning, these facilitators are at best constrained by the official IB materials and examples and only permitted to allow sharing between participants. At worst, they rely on examples gained from books or podcasts, which are completely shorn from the realities of a day to day classroom.

Many teachers or departments at these kind of trainings find themselves delivering the MYP due to a shift in school policy or after arriving from abroad. In both situations, the sheer volume of philosophical and pedagogical change needed to implement the MYP framework is such that people cannot help but rely upon external providers to help shape their curriculum, despite the opaque actuality or outcomes of the expert’s usual instruction.

Returning to meal metaphors

For some, inquiry is a stance. It is the plate on which the main meal sits. It is the underlying principle that guides students towards everything they learn from disciplinary to substantive knowledge. The success of the unit not only relies on the teachers ability to design effective scaffolds but also actively checking in with the numerous educational journeys being embarked upon and finding a way to assess what has been learnt and demonstrated in a valid and reliable manner.

This is the same stance that maintains the ‘guide on the side’ advice for teachers. That in the age of AI and YouTube, students can be more self-directed in their learning and teachers are strictly facilitating their progress, presumably provided this all exists within “Careful curriculum design”.

For others, inquiry is a dessert. In an interview with Craig Barton, Tom Sherrington offers a tip that occasional open-response tasks are a wonderful opportunity for students to demonstrate their knowledge in a way unbound by typical curriculum expectations. These usually come at the end of a unit, end of a term or end of the year meaning that they are superfluous to the demands of the taught and assessed curriculum. However, as Tom suggests, these often yield very impressive results with students demonstrating their knowledge in unique and sophisticated ways.

This may excite those that then believe such freedom of creativity and expression belongs at the forefront of every unit and that teachers truly can be a mere guide on the side. But it is crucial to remember that much like dessert, it has come at the end of a sequence of learning when students have acquired a significant body of knowledge. Any such creative endeavours are ultimately strengthened by the original sequence that was deliberately and responsively structured by the teacher.

Many schools tasked with implementing inquiry see it more as a side dish. It is something to be done mid-unit when a teacher has collected in the set of books and needs time and space to process their students’ progress. During this period, students may embark on a task that requires them to research a related or freely chosen topic and prepare to present the information in a format that best suits their interests.

This is almost always given the respect it deserves by students, which is little to nothing. Powerpoints or Google Slide templates abound and plagiarism is rampant. The feedback lesson or presentations are tortuous as every person knows it is designed to buy the teacher time and therefore the level of engagement, effort and satisfaction is often absent.

Could it be dip?

As ludicrous as this subheading sounds, I do feel dip or sauce may be an appropriate metaphor for how inquiry should be viewed in the secondary English classroom.

Whilst your pastas, fries or rice are the main provision, far more joy is gained by the accompanying flavours they come with. What is the humble chip without dip? What would tagliatelle be without arrabiata?

Essentially, my assertion is that inquiry is not vital to a students’ knowledge or skills acquisition but without it, progress in the discipline can seem stale.

Take for example a unit we begin Year 9 with to reinforce the topics of genre, setting and context. We could focus solely on conventions, vocabulary, techniques and structure that would be pertinent to their understanding before giving them a prompt along the lines of: “describe a person who is lost in an unfamiliar place” or “describe a person who feels undefeated” and allocating a pre-agreed duration of time in class to complete it.

Such an outcome could undoubtedly prove to be a both valid and reliable assessment of what has been learnt as well as laying further foundation in a progressional model of the English curriculum.

However, I feel that in the long run, there is something to be said for David Perkins’ assertion that students need to ‘play the whole game’ . In other words, students can more often be motivated to labour over something if they see the holistic worth or relevance to their own lives. Whilst this can also undoubtedly fall prey to lethal mutation too, I feel there is an essential truth in this for English teaching.

Adding dip

How might we take the: genre, setting and context unit add some sense of holistic or relevant worth to students?

In this case, we immediately draw students’ attention to the relationship between genre and context. Lessons guide students through the understanding that a genre such as gothic or dystopian can very often be a vehicle for a writer’s argument about a contextual issue. Attention then turns to an inquiry into issues that are prevalent in their own context, which will form the basis of a passage reflecting not only this issue but also the conventions of a genre they have learnt about.

In the past, we have had students explore their city’s mental health crisis through a suicidal person atop a gargantuan skyscraper, water pollution through an abandoned container tanker and inadequate housing through life in Kowloon Walled City 2.0. Each of which came as a result of independent research, planning and drafting of ideas.

There is 100% an opportunity cost here. Whereas more short stories, extracts and/or consolidation of knowledge and skills could have taken place, students’ attention is instead being drawn towards researching a topic that will take a number of hours to comprehend, gather data about and eventually present on.

Such a trade-off is being done with the belief that “prior knowledge and experience” or “students’ own curiosity” about an issue in the city will provide initial and lasting engagement. Additionally, in engaging with their own influences, students are recreating the process of published writers in an appropriately controlled manner, so as to achieve “authentic performances of understanding that call for critical and creative thinking”.

Limitations

As previously stated, I feel there is an essential truth in this for English teaching but have no idea if it would apply in other subject disciplines. Worryingly, when receiving MYP training, the current format has workshop facilitators deliver the same set of training materials irrespective of subject discipline. Only minor changes are made according to student examples and so on.

Whilst authenticity, prior knowledge and creativity are noble goals to aim for in every department, research would suggest that the IB has to do more to differentiate what this actually means in practice.

Polman and Scornavacco, who ran a study into Meanings and Practices of Inquiry-Based Teaching and Learning in the International Baccalaureate, advise in their concluding comments that the IB do more to help train teachers in what inquiry looks in respective subject areas and at respective age ranges.

This would therefore require school based leaders to place greater trust in middle-management to expertly define, refine and spread best practice for what inquiry means in respective subject classrooms.