Over 200 teachers, school leaders, university faculty, and other supporters joined us on March 23rd for our Teacher Inquiry in Action Forum. Thank you to all who participated in this remarkable event! Below are highlights from this celebration of teacher professional learning.  ...

As a teacher of struggling readers, I find myself constantly grappling with what to do with my high schoolers who are reading multiple grades below level. They walk in and out of my classroom each day and I see their sense of self as students waver as they are confronted with harder and harder texts. The need to serve them is immediate but also daunting. No two struggling readers seem to have the same need and the research about supporting readers is vast and divergent. In an effort to design the best strategic reading class for 14 incredible students who are challenged by reading each day at my small school in the Fruitvale of Oakland, I leaned on best practices. I had learned about the practice of “Mazes” to support reading comprehension during my Masters program and decided to adopt it as a weekly routine. Mazes are short passages where every 7th word has been omitted. Students then choose the correct word from a choice of three as they read the passage. They have 3 minutes to do so and are measured on their number of correct selections and their words per minute. This provides both the student and the teacher immediate data about silent reading comprehension and fluency. I hoped that weekly practice with this exercise would help them develop their fluency and comprehension and, as they saw their own improvement, develop their confidence in themselves as readers. A few months into the practice I found that students were not seeing growth, nor was I, and collectively we were feeling more and more frustrated around the practice. With my Mills Teacher Scholars facilitator, Jen, I began to think about the forms of data I could collect about the practice in order to gain a better understanding of whether it was helping meet my learning goal for students. She suggested that I provide students more space to reflect on the practice and share with me their own opinions about the plateaued results on the exercise. I decided to embed an additional data source into my routine in the form of a post- Maze reflection that asked students to look closely at their progress. I found myself unsure about how best to serve my students as I read their reflections that were bleeding with frustration. One student wrote, “In my opinion Mazes are not helping my reading because I am still only getting 13 correct answers.” It was answers like these that caused me to dig deeper and turn to the students even more around the routine. The class was for them, and their needs were urgent.

Program Associate Jennifer Ahn When I was a teacher, I sat through countless professional development workshops. The topic varied, but the format was often the same: I would sit with my notebook at hand and scribble notes as an expert told me how to do something--how to teach vocabulary to second language learners, how to support students to engage in academic discussion, how to get students to write analysis. Sometimes I was asked to engage in small activities that mimicked the experiences students would have; other times a presenter would model the new teaching strategy. I would leave these workshops energized with some new ideas to try in my classroom, yet these notes and workshop handouts would get buried under a pile of essays I had to read or the binder collected dust on a bookshelf. It wasn’t that I didn’t learn anything in these workshops—often the presenters were engaging and the content was thought-provoking. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to improve my practice or felt that I had no room to grow. Quite to the contrary, I attended those workshops because I wanted to find new, better ways to help my students learn. The real barrier was that I didn’t have the time or the thinking space to really dig into these tools as I practiced them and make sense of them in the context of my students’ learning. I usually tried something once or twice, but rarely did any of the “best practices” have lasting power. A student-centered approach Teacher-driven inquiry is a different approach to improving practice. The goal is the same-- to improve teaching to support student learning; the difference is really in the journey. Instead of solutions driving the work, inquiry starts with uncertainty and wondering. Teachers focus in on a particular instructional routine and ask themselves questions: “What are my students able to do?” "What does success look like for these students in my classrooms?" “What is getting in the way of my students’ learning?” When Mills Teacher Scholars partners with a school or a district, we don’t bring answers to these questions. Instead, we create a collaborative thinking space and create the conditions in which teachers can investigate these authentic, complex questions with the support of their colleagues. We don’t talk at teachers or talk broadly about student learning; rather, we encourage teachers to look for and examine student data in their classrooms to find answers to their questions that address their students’ specific needs.