Learning Stories and Teacher Inquiry Groups: Re-imagining Teaching and Assessment in Early Childhood Education

Isauro M. Escamilla, Linda R. Kroll, Daniel R. Meier, Annie White, Isauro Escamilla, Daniel Meier

• Publisher: The National Association for the Education of Young Children
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781938113918
• eBook ISBN: 9781938113925
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Enhance your professional development and partner with children and families to improve learning experiences in a range of early childhood settings and programs.

Learn how to integrate the Learning Stories approach and teacher inquiry groups to promote authentic assessment to inform instruction, and foster collegial team building and collaboration. The writing of Learning Stories integrated within the professional development process of teacher inquiry, documentation, and reflection offers a new model of professional support and a method for reaching out to children and families.

The Learning Stories approach is used primarily with children from birth through age 8, and educators in classrooms and programs, administrators, professional development specialists, instructional coaches, and teacher educators can benefit from this approach.

Within this book, you'll find

• Extensive examples linking Learning Stories and teacher inquiry groups
• Key ideas, strategies, and reflection questions
• Information on how Learning Stories can supplement assessment tools such as QRIS, DRDP, and CLASS
• Resources and approaches for starting your own inquiry group

An online study guide accompanies the book. (See inside for information.) Use this handy guide in a college or university course, your professional learning community, or your own book club with colleagues.

Chapter 1

The Power of Teacher Inquiry Groups: Linking Inquiry, Documentation, and Reflection

Defined as practice-based inquiry, teacher inquiry emerges when teachers stumble upon a unique and often troubling matter of concern, something that puzzles and perplexes.

— Renetta Goeson (2014, 3)

Opening Reflections

› What does teacher inquiry mean to you?

› Are there elements of your preservice teacher development at the AA, BA, or MA levels that focused on teacher inquiry?

› Have you had direct experience at your teaching site conducting your own teacher inquiry either on your own or with colleagues? If so, how did you benefit personally and professionally from this process?

› Have you considered undertaking elements of teacher inquiry and are curious about what’s involved?

› If you were to initiate or join a teacher inquiry group with colleagues at your site or other sites, what resources do you need to get started?

This chapter defines teacher inquiry, reflection, and documentation, and describes the basic goals, structure, and benefits of teacher inquiry groups. In placing a special emphasis on inquiry groups, we highlight how regular, systematic group meetings at early childhood sites provide a collaborative, supportive forum for teachers to present their ongoing inquiry work and Learning Stories.

In these meetings, often with the aid of a meeting protocol, teachers receive targeted, supportive feedback from colleagues regarding next steps for inquiry, Learning Stories, and also teaching. In this chapter, we describe and share several actual contexts and examples of teachers starting inquiry groups with colleagues and implementing Learning Stories. These examples highlight the varied ways that teachers can approach the creation of inquiry groups as well as diverse strategies for integrating Learning Stories.

Creating a Learning Story in the Context of an Inquiry Group

Teaching young children can be an overwhelming, exciting, ever-changing experience that can be the most satisfying profession. Or it can be a profession filled with frustrations, directives, and shortages. Or it can be both. Most importantly, teachers need to feel some control and agency over their teaching and their classrooms or centers, to feel that they know what they are doing and why they are doing it, and to feel in sync with the other teachers (in their classroom or at their school), the children, and the families who make up their learning communities.

When you meet with fellow teachers to reflect on what you each have noticed in your classrooms, to propose questions about what is happening in your classrooms, and to systematically think about what you are doing, you can feel supported in the work you do together and with the children you teach and their families. Meeting together on a regular basis provides the opportunity to reflect collectively on what is occurring in your classrooms, to learn how better to reflect by yourselves, and to challenge one another as critical friends to ask yourselves questions about your classrooms, your students, and their families.

Consider this example of teachers in a preschool classroom. In Room 5, three teachers, Ayla, Aaron, and Laura, work with a group of energetic children ages 3 to 5. They are just beginning to experiment with Learning Stories and to work together as an inquiry group.

Teacher Ayla writes a Learning Story, “Dear Alex,” about Alex, a 4-year-old boy learning to write and draw during small group time. Her Learning Story is in the form of a letter to Alex about learning to try new things, particularly in writing and drawing. The story includes a passage about Alex’s progression from screaming about not wanting to join the group to being first to come to group time. Alex became more comfortable being in class and working on his writing after the children started using the mantra, “practice makes better,” which the children had developed during their group discussion.

After Ayla shares her Learning Story, teachers Aaron and Laura share their own examples of the children’s group support for each other’s learning. By the end of the discussion, the Room 5 teachers have shared a learning story directed to one child, a learning story directed to a small group of children about making friends, and a video of children thinking about the “middle of a building block” (with several different shapes and middles being shared). In each instance, the teachers share their stories with questions about what the other teachers notice about the children and the teaching practice in the story. We will revisit this classroom and the teachers in this example throughout the chapter as we discuss the process of teacher inquiry with the Learning Story approach.

The Importance of Reflection

Reflection on your practice means that you take the time to think about what has happened in your classroom; to examine artifacts of the work that you have done and that the children have created, including your notes, photographs, audio recordings, and video recordings to jog your memory; and to help you see things that you didn’t notice at the time. As you learn to do this in a systematic fashion (e.g., on a regular basis, using tools you become comfortable with, referring to your data to think ahead), you move from reflection to inquiry—to asking questions about what is happening in your classroom in order to teach your students and yourself better.

What about if you teach alone in a family child care center? Can you still collaborate and think together? The more you are NOT alone in your thinking, the more supported and reflective you can feel and be. There are many options for finding thinking partners, even if most of your teaching is done with just one adult and a small group of children. We will be discussing those possibilities here and in future chapters as well. But it is important to remember that there are already reflection partners in your worksites—the children and their families—and it is also possible to reflect with folks who are not with you every day but who share common interests in thinking about this work.

Reflection on what happens in classrooms among children, families, and teachers can lead to questions about the occurrences that puzzle or impress and amaze you. In thinking about these occurrences systematically, you can begin a process of inquiry, which is essentially an informed and systematic extension of a reflection process. In the example, Ayla, Laura, and Aaron are all engaging together in this kind of reflection and inquiry about what children are taking away from their small group teaching practices.

From Reflection to Inquiry

Inquiry can occur via a number of vehicles among teachers such as through examining artifacts (e.g., student work or photos of students’ interactions) and through sharing documentation such as observation notes or even video or audio recordings of teaching and children’s responses. For example, Ayla, Aaron, Laura, and I (author Linda) watched a video of a teaching moment that prompted Laura to question both her teaching and the children’s understanding of the concept she was teaching.

Documentation is key to the inquiry process. Different forms of documentation of classroom interactions and play can be used to spark discussions and the development of more formal inquiry questions. Documentation consists of the many materials that teacher inquirers collect over the course of a project or activity. Through the sharing and discussion of documentation, teachers can move together from discussing general puzzling ideas or specific wonderings about an occurrence to more focused inquiry. Above all, inquiry is a stance or an attitude toward your work. It reflects a curiosity, a passion, and an interest. In taking an inquiry stance you try not to be critical or negative about what you are doing or have done. Asking “what went right?” and “what went wrong?” are not as productive questions as “what happened here?” or “what were the children (or the teachers) thinking about here?”

Forms of Documentation: Provoking Questions and Wonderings

There are two primary forms of documentation: in-progress or “raw” documentation (Meier with Chavez, Eung, & Mancina 2017) and documentation for further inquiry (Forman & Fyfe 2012; Box 1.1).

Participants in an inquiry group learn to experiment with a range of documentation processes and products, and to see how others in the group put their own personal twist or stamp on their documentation. No documentation process or product is ever the same, nor should it be. Effective documentation comes from an organized system for collection of material as well as individual creativity and inventiveness. Effective documentation, though, is influenced by several dimensions. For instance, the preschool teacher inquirer Oscar Chavez, links his documentation to several interrelated dimensions: instruction, children’s learning, and family support (Meier with Chavez, Eung, & Mancina 2017, 77).

Examples of in-progress or “raw” documentation

• Photographs of children’s actions or constructions

• Children’s art products

• Teachers’ written observational notes

• Teachers’ reflective journal entries

• Brief audio and video clips

• Children’s dictations and stories

• Group brainstorms captured as hard or electronic copies

Examples of documentation for further inquiry

• Documentation binder or book

• Documentation panel

• Documentation on the wall or bulletin board

• More detailed video footage

• Classroom or school blog as hard copies or electronic

• Learning Stories as hard or electronic copies

Box 1.1. Two Primary Forms of Documentation

Each inquiry group develops its own toolbox of documentation strategies and materials, and over time group members broaden and deepen their individual and collective expertise in using this toolbox. For instance, the Las Americas inquiry group (consisting of teachers at a public preschool in San Francisco and co-facilitated by authors Isauro and Daniel) has experimented with a range of forms of documentation over the last several years. The inquiry group started out collecting and sharing photographs of children at work and play in and outside of the classroom, as well as the children’s learning products, such as their artwork. Participants also wrote notes about what they observed in the classroom and shared these notes in the meetings. Over the next few years, the group organized these materials into books, binders, small and large panels, electronic blogs, slide shows or presentations, audio and video clips, and portfolios. More recently, the group has focused on the creation and sharing of Learning Stories.

Documentation of classroom interactions, activities, curricula, and children’s work can be used both for reflection and for the development of and explication of inquiry questions. To illustrate, we revisit the teachers in Room 5: Laura had begun a cooking unit with the children. As the children learned to cook different kinds of foods and as the unit evolved, Laura began collecting artifacts that reflected some of this learning, such as children’s drawings, quotations from the children’s discussions and photos of the children and their cooking products. As she examined these artifacts with her fellow teachers, they asked questions of each other about what children were learning from these cooking adventures, including what they were learning about the effects of heat and different kinds of heat on food (e.g., whether things were cooked in the oven or on top of the stove or in the microwave). They were also learning about cooking techniques, such as stirring, mixing, kneading, and measuring. In one instance, children were weighing dough to make breadsticks, then rolling out the dough and finding that both the weighing process and the rolling process were challenging in different ways. Laura was learning these things too! By examining the photographs of her work, the video of one group’s experience with weighing the dough, and the children’s drawings of what they had done, she had a better idea of what they had taken away from the activity. Presenting these artifacts to her fellow teachers raised new questions.

KEY IDEA

Documentation

Documentation can include many different kinds of artifacts, including observation notes, photographs, videos, audio recordings, and children’s work. It can be unorganized examples or it can be gathered together into a binder or poster for further examination. As Carla Rinaldi explains, “Documentation is interpreted and used for its value as a tool for recalling: that is, as a possibility for reflection” (Project Zero & Reggio Children 2001, 78).

To include the children in the inquiry process, Laura and her group of children created a documentation panel that was posted at child eye height in the classroom. The pan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Power of Teacher Inquiry Groups: Linking Inquiry, Documentation, and Reflection
• Chapter 2: Learning Stories as an Approach and Framework for Authentic Assessment and Critical Pedagogy
• Chapter 3: Identifying and Creating Learning Stories
• Chapter 4: Integrating Inquiry and Learning Stories for Socialization, Play, and Language
• Chapter 5: Integrating Inquiry and Learning Stories for Equitable Learning Opportunities
• Chapter 6: Family Engagement and Learning Stories: Inclusion of Diverse Voices
• Appendix A: Learning Stories Can Supplement Various Assessment Tools
• Appendix B: Resources and Approaches for Starting Your Own Inquiry Group
• About the Authors
• Index