Teaching Is Inquiry: Observation and Reflection as the Heart of Practice

Use this framework to better understanda wide range of students, including those identified as struggling.

Many teachers maintain commitments to ideas and practices that they rarely question. Among these assumptions are ideas about children and the variety of reasons as to how they might learn or fail to learn. Teaching as inquiry is the practice of gaining distance from one’s assumptions about teaching and learning to better serve all children, including those struggling in school (K-9).

Ballenger shares stories from her experiences, demonstrating that children are always thinking and always making sense and, going further, that the ideas of our most puzzling students lead us to new recognition of what thinking looks like. Readers will learn how teaching with documentation and reflection develops and deepens their practice over time.

Divided into three sections, chapters address the framework for inquiry, language and reading groups, and the interests of particular children with special needs in relation to the curriculum. Teaching Is Inquiry details the practices of teacher inquiry with a series of sometimes sad, sometimes joyful stories from the classroom.

Book Features:

• Urges teachers to move beyond ＂the first look＂ or more superficial understandings of students.
• Demonstrates the value of documentation in order to better understand the ideas of a wide range of students, including those identified as struggling.
• Showcases the author’s powers of observation that have inspired many teachers’ inquiry into their own practice.
• Offers reflections that are both complex and open to further interpretation on the part of readers.
• Extends the author’s examination of ＂puzzling moments＂--encounters with students that may be difficult to comprehend or do not conform to more typical interactions.

Cynthia Ballenger has been a public school teacher for 35 years and has worked with teachers and student teachers in various ways. She has written a number of books about her experiences teaching a diversity of students, including Teaching Other People’s Children: Literacy and Learning in a Bilingual Classroom and Puzzling Moments, Teachable Moments: Practicing Teacher Research in Urban Classrooms.