Kimberly Mitchell—The Inquiry 5

[00:01] Justin Baeder:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Baeder. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] Kimberly Mitchell:

I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome back to the show Kimberly Mitchell. Kimberly is a writer, workshop leader, and speaker with a focus on deeper learning and inquiry-based teaching practices. currently teaching at the University of Washington's excellent College of Education. Her previous experience includes serving as a principal and teacher in diverse locations such as Athens, Seattle, Los Angeles, Ecuador, and elsewhere around the globe, as well as a stint as a senior program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And she's now the CEO of Inquiry Partners, where she works with school districts.

[00:54] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:56] Kimberly Mitchell:

So, Kimberly, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:59] Kimberly Mitchell:

Nice to be back. Thanks, Justin.

[01:01] Kimberly Mitchell:

So, you have a new book out, Experience Inquiry, Five Powerful Strategies, 50 Practical Experiences. And I'm very excited to learn more about the book and share that with our audience. First of all, I wonder if we could start by talking about... What inquiry is, because it seems like one of those great things that we should all know about, but actually doing inquiry or making inquiry a part of our instructional program, it's a little fuzzy for a lot of us.

[01:26]

So what is inquiry in your book?

[01:28] Kimberly Mitchell:

Yeah, so I define inquiry as a way of being and leading, in other words, a disposition, and as a way of teaching or pedagogy. And what these things do is get students to do most of the question asking and answer seeking in classrooms. You're right. It's very fuzzy. I think people tend to intellectualize inquiry. I don't know about you and some of the listeners, but for many years when I started off as a principal, people would mention inquiry-based instruction.

[01:59]

And I would think back to my classes on Dewey and constructivism. And I think I understood it. But I didn't see it very often or I couldn't get my arms around it. And I certainly don't feel like I ever was a practitioner of inquiry, truly, now that I know what it is and I've seen it in action. And as a student, you know, I didn't experience inquiry really. So it's challenging for us to understand what it is.

[02:29]

And so I wrote this book to help people ground an understanding of inquiry in the practical day-to-day work.

[02:36] Kimberly Mitchell:

Well, Kimberly, it kind of reminds me of the feeling of visiting a Montessori classroom or visiting kind of that one magical teacher's classroom where things just feel different. And the kids, you know, and you could have done this in the 80s, right? You could have gone into certain teachers classrooms and just felt that student ownership felt different. that sense that this was a different place where students were doing a different kind of intellectual work, where they had a level of ownership over their learning that was, you know, just very unusual and powerful. And I think for myself as a principal, you know, I also went to the University of Washington as a PhD candidate and prior to that as an aspiring principal, did my certification program there and learned a lot about inquiry. And I do feel like it's one of those underlying skills that we need to have and that we need to convey to students.

[03:29]

But again, it is kind of fuzzy. We know it when we see it or like we feel it when we see it, but actually knowing how to do inquiry, how to be inquisitive. intentional about making inquiry part of our schools is something that I'm very much looking to you on because, again, for me, it is fuzzy. So you identify five strategies in the book, and I wonder if we could just kind of give those as an overview and then dive into some specifics.

[03:57] Kimberly Mitchell:

Sure. Well, the first strategy is establishing emotional bonds with students and very hard to take risks with ideas and ask questions if you don't feel like there's trust and respect in the classroom. So the first strategy is called get personal. The second strategy is staying curious. So this is more of a disposition of the teacher. Are you still wondering alongside your students as opposed to being the answer key, as Dan Finkel will say.

[04:28]

The third strategy is sort of the quintessential And that is talking less and asking more. So we know that there is an imbalance of teacher talk versus student talk in most classrooms. And I think we also understand why that's the case. We have content to cover and it seems more efficient to talk. How do we put that cognitive load together? on the students?

[04:51]

And how do we get students to ask good questions? Because we also see that, you know, every year that students stay in school, they tend to ask fewer questions, not more. The fourth strategy is encouraging evidence. And this is so important in this day and age where students have information literally at their fingertips now. So how do we get them to rigorously analyze and make sure that they have credible sources? And finally, extending thinking time.

[05:17]

So this is interpreted in many ways. First of all, wait time, pausing more, talking a little bit slower, something I'm working on, allowing people to absorb information. And this also goes into areas like mindfulness and genius hour in that 20% time, which part of project-based learning, problem-based learning, challenge-based learning. So just breathing in more space for students to explore their own curiosities.

[05:44] Kimberly Mitchell:

So Kimberly, for our audience of administrators and instructional leaders who want to get into classrooms, when we do get into a classroom where inquiry is happening, or when we get into classrooms and we want to see if inquiry is happening, what are some of the visible signs? What does inquiry look like? Because we know our definitions can be a little bit fuzzy. It can look like a lot of different things. So what do you look for when you're looking for inquiry?

[06:08] Kimberly Mitchell:

So I love what you said right before I shared the strategies about how we know it when we see it, but how do we do it? And I was really challenged by this. Someone said, what's like a checklist for me? I mean, it's so hard to put your stake in the ground on these things because it requires a lot of research. And a teacher once said, let me know when you walk into a classroom as a school leader, as a principal, as someone who knows inquiry, what are you looking for? And I actually, in my book, I put together a self-survey with a few statements, a few things that people can reflect on.

[06:50]

And I wanted to share with you what I look for. And these are evolving. So I hesitated to do this, but I think people really appreciate having some concrete ideas. So I want to share just a couple things and see how this sounds. The first thing I look for typically when I go into a classroom and look for inquiry is, are the students immediately when a stranger walks in the door looking up to see who the stranger is, or are they more absorbed in their work? And again, you have to do this periodically, and this is what I love about what you do is encouraging people to get into classrooms and give better feedback on teaching.

[07:26]

You have to get in frequently, right? Because there is a time and place for teachers to talk. But if you keep going into classrooms, you should start to see patterns of the teacher's not always visible. Students know what they're doing. They're more in charge. Students are doing most of the talking.

[07:46]

And this is really hard. Students are doing most of the question asking. So Instead of the teacher sort of hitting the tennis ball to someone and then it coming back to the teacher and the eyes are still on the teacher, you start to see the students playing soccer together. They're like passing the ball between themselves. And, you know, you can do this at every grade level.

[08:06] Kimberly Mitchell:

I love that metaphor of seeing students play soccer rather than play tennis with the teacher. I love that because it speaks to that degree of ownership that if you're familiar with the Danielson framework, that's what level four practice looks like, right? It's not just that the teacher is managing things effectively. It's that ownership has shifted over to the students and they are talking to one another. They're posing the questions. They're responding to one another.

[08:30]

And the teacher has done the most important thing for the teacher to do and can kind of step back and step out of the way and let students carry the day.

[08:39] Kimberly Mitchell:

Yeah, I also look for students speaking academically more than the teacher on average. And sometimes, you know, you see that in the class period and sometimes you calculate that over a couple of days or a week. The other thing is students are asking as many or more questions than the teacher. And this is challenging to do. I'm a big fan of structures like the question formulation technique and other ways to get students to do that. I look for students...

[09:08]

having opportunities to explore their own interests. So it could be something structured like a 20% time or genius hour. It could be just five minutes of quiet reflection. So breathing in space to absorb information and maybe generate new ideas, turn in talks and creative structures to get students to start wrestling with information on their own. I had a teacher once say, at the end of the day, it's my students' pits that should be sweaty, not mine. And I love this because, you know, as a teacher, my pits are sweaty when I plan.

[09:44]

You know, I plan, I have to like create and design a lesson that engages students. But in the moment, in the actual teaching process, It's the students who should be working a lot harder than I am.

[09:56] Kimberly Mitchell:

I love that. You know, it gets back to that idea that whoever is doing the most work is doing the most learning, you know, and if the students are the ones who are tired at the end of the day, you know, and I remember reading as a first year teacher, Harry Wong says, you know, your students should be tired at the end of the day, more tired than you because they have done more of the work because they're the learners. They're the ones who are here to learn. And of course, our professional learning. is often outside of class time. That's when we do a lot of the hard work is when we're collaborating, when we're planning and engaging in that work that sets the stage for the hard work that students will do.

[10:27]

And you actually have a chapter in the book or one of your 50 experiences that you offer to teachers on how to make inquiry a real experience for for students. One of them is number 30 in chapter seven. How do you teach with your mouth shut is the title of that experience. Tell us a little bit about that one.

[10:50] Kimberly Mitchell:

That is actually borrowed from a professor, the late Don Finkel, who is from the Evergreen State College. He wrote a book called Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. He was a college professor. I see him as one of my inquiry mentors. His son is is Dan Finkel, who just started an organization some of your listeners may know about called Math for Love. He's graduated with his PhD in applied math from the University of Washington and is dedicated to inquiry-based math instruction.

[11:22]

Teaching with your mouth shut is basically receding to the most of the talking and thinking in the classroom. And it requires designing experiences, problems, challenges inside the classroom that provoke their curiosity and sense of wonder and allows them time to do just that without the teacher constantly narrating or explaining, getting students to explain for each other, utilizing resources to do that. And Dr. Finkel wrote this book before the advent of Google. So it's a great book, and I've learned a lot from him. And so that chapter is really to honor his legacy and his views on teaching.

[12:06] Kimberly Mitchell:

I laughed a little bit when I read that because Amy and I were in El Salvador recently. She was teaching a two-day workshop on project-based learning to teachers from a group of schools. She had about 45 teachers there. And as you know, as a workshop facilitator, your planning that you do ahead of time is a big part of your success. It's not a song and dance nearly as much as it is designing a learning experience. And that turned out to be absolutely critical because when she got there, she had completely lost her voice.

[12:35]

She had had a cold for a couple of days and had almost no voice when she started, and what she did have quickly wore away. So by about the middle of the first day, her voice was gone. And fortunately, that didn't make all that much of a difference because guess who was doing the majority of the work in that two-day program? the teachers who were there to plan their own units. And I had to repeat a few things into the microphone by way of instructions and provide a little bit of teacher talk, so to speak. But for the most part, it was the participants who were doing the work.

[13:08]

And I think that idea of intellectual engagement is so powerful as an antidote to what virtually everybody hates about school, that it's just boring and you just sit there and listen, right? Like, isn't that what people have been complaining about school for, you know, for generations, that it's boring, that it's not engaging, that, you know, a teacher who's talking and learners who are passive, you know, if we want to change that, if we want to be the generation of educators that changes that, I think some of these strategies for inquiry are really going to show up at the heart of our practice today. I think there's a concern, though, Kimberly, that inquiry is fluffy, you know, a concern that this is just like talking about our feelings or that this is just a focus on process rather than actual content. You know, and as educators, we're accountable for making sure that students learn a particular set of knowledge and skills.

[14:02]

So we know it can't just be process. There actually does have to be content that's taught through that inquiry. And you talked a little bit earlier about encouraging evidence and, you know, kind of making sure that student talk is substantive and not just kind of BS, so to speak, that, you know, that there's actually some substance and some rigor in that conversation. So talk to us a little bit about using evidence and how to get students to back up what they're saying with evidence.

[14:28] Kimberly Mitchell:

We know from neuroscience research that there are principles that embed learning and drive memory systems and engagement in the brain. There needs to be attention to the task. Students must generate or create connections to previous knowledge. Emotions must be regulated. Hopefully we're going for positive emotions in our classrooms, and there needs to be sufficient time and spacing. Okay, so with those four ideas, the research is on the side of inquiry.

[14:56]

Inquiry is not about ignoring content and just talking about process. It's both and. It's absolutely critical that we wrestle with the content, but inquiry is driving how we wrestle with the content. It's the pedagogy, right? It's not necessarily the curriculum. It goes hand in hand.

[15:13]

So There's absolutely a time and place for students to stop and listen to a podcast, watch a video, read challenging texts, listen to a guest speaker. That is the grist for the proverbial mill. But the way we get students to wrestle with information and deepen their understanding, that's where inquiry comes in and is absolutely critical and is backed up by cognitive science.

[15:40] Kimberly Mitchell:

And I think there's this idea that student talk is mostly about opinion. We were talking about this at the Principal Center here a couple months ago because I think all of us who work here, all of our employees have had to take online college classes where there was a discussion board that was part of the online class. And in the discussion board, not only do you have to post your work or your responses to the assignment, but you also have to comment on other people's. And I think we've all had that frustration of being required to comment and seeing other people's mandatory comments. And in some cases, I've had my own articles be the subject of university classes, you know, go comment on this article. I'm like, what is happening here?

[16:17]

Why are all these people commenting today? You know, we've had this experience of seeing those comments that are just basically like, okay, I'll take a turn talking, blah, blah, blah. And then you take a turn talking, blah, blah. And now we've completed our requirement that we both talk. And it's really just, you know, it's not debate. You know, it's not that healthy debate that you talk about it.

[16:36]

It's not an evidence-based kind of substantive engagement with ideas. So draw some distinctions for me. Like, how do I know as a principal, if what I'm seeing as I'm participating in a class discussion, you know, I'm excited that the kids are talking, I'm excited that they're having a discussion. But what does it feel like to be in an intellectually healthy and rigorous class discussion, rather than just one of those, okay, now we all have to take turns talking without really engaging with one another discussions?

[17:05] Kimberly Mitchell:

Yeah, you're so right, Justin. And we've gotten lazy. Turn and talk. It can be opinion. You could be right. You could be wrong.

[17:12]

And so we absolutely need to start asking a variation of this question. How do you know that? How do you know that? We need to start, you know, from preschool on. Adults often take offense to a question like this, but we have to get used to it and we have to start regularly and without prompting, citing our sources. So Just yesterday in my class, a student made a comment along the lines of, well, you know, private school teachers make more than public school teachers.

[17:45]

And I thought, okay, here's a moment, you know, either I can correct this misconception or this idea, or I can turn it back on the student and just ask this person, how do you know that? And you could hear sort of a stunned silence in the room. And I didn't mean it as, Necessarily you are wrong. And now I'm gonna prove you're wrong It was really like let's talk about where this comes from because it comes from somewhere How did he get this notion and he said well I have a cousin who teaches in California and left the public school system Because he could make more at a private or independent school. Okay Well, that could be one situation that has some validity but then it gave me a clue that now we need some more information, right and Now I need to provide the class with some ideas that either confirm this or debunk it.

[18:37]

And so it really is just stopping the conversation periodically and saying, back up your claim. Let's talk about this.

[18:45] Kimberly Mitchell:

One of my recent interests is in this idea of a standard of evidence and how in different contexts we have different ways of deciding what's true and, you know, different burdens of proof or different standards of evidence, you know, ranging from, you know, a criminal courtroom to, you know, just citing a source. I love the stickers. There's a website that sells these little stickers that you can put on a sign. Like if you see an advertisement, you can put a sticker on it. that says citation needed, just like they have on Wikipedia articles. You know, if you're reading a Wikipedia article...

[19:18] Kimberly Mitchell:

I have not heard of this. I love it. That's brilliant.

[19:20] Kimberly Mitchell:

You know, and I think that's just a healthy impulse to say, okay, if we're going to make a claim here, especially a claim that's going counter to what everybody else thinks... or that maybe we have just not questioned because we've always heard that it was true, citing our sources, holding ourselves accountable for that, saying, how would we know if this is true? What would our criteria be? And doing that in advance of determining the facts so that we can be honest to those facts when we encounter them.

[19:48]

I think that in a world of abundant information, but also a world of reinforced signals. You know, if I like a bunch of things on Facebook, Facebook's going to show me more of what I like. If I follow certain news sources, those news sources are going to show me things that reinforce my existing beliefs rather than challenge them with new information. And, you know, I will say on Facebook, One of the things that I've really enjoyed is engaging in discussions with people who have very different perspectives from me. And in some cases, they don't even like engaging in discussions with people who have different perspectives because it can be challenging. But I like getting at those kind of roots of an argument and figuring out, okay, why does this person believe what they believe?

[20:30]

How do they know what they know? And I think those are some of the most important questions that we face as a society, as a democracy, as a species right now, because so much of that is in flux. You know, 500 years ago, we knew that the earth was the center of the universe because that's what everyone taught. You know, that's what the institutions taught. And when Galileo came along and said, no, you know, actually the sun is the center of the solar system and the earth moves around the sun. Figuring out what the standard of evidence for that was took a very long time and gaining acceptance for something that to us now is obvious took a very long time.

[21:07]

And I think those are such critical habits of mind to teach to students in an age where what they end up doing with their lives, you know, the specific knowledge that they need to do their jobs 20 years from now, we have no idea what that's going to be. But we do know that they're going to need to be able to determine what is true. They're going to need to be able to make decisions based on evidence. They're going to need to be able to work with other people and make decisions together. So I love these strategies and these principles that you have in the book. But I also want to point out for anybody who's not actually looking at the book right at this moment that you actually have these described as experiences.

[21:45]

You have 50 experiences in the book. So I wonder if we could close by just kind of taking us through how you envision teachers using those experiences in their classrooms or in professional learning or in whatever setting to teach inquiry.

[21:59] Kimberly Mitchell:

Thank you so much for noticing that I used the language of experience instead of activities. You know, I wrote the book, obviously, to unlock and open up some practical ideas for inquiry and implementing it. But I really, more than anything, I wanted to give teachers an excuse to come together and to have an experience of inquiry themselves. So...

[22:24]

Super meta, right? Like I wanted them to come together in PLCs to go through the experience of what it's like to be an inquiry student, to unleash their own curiosity. So they're strategically called experiences. Each of these experiences can be used. among adults, but they can also be adapted and adopted for classrooms. I also, as a former principal, I want to also encourage this book for school leaders as well and professional development leaders, because I think cultivating inquiry-based classrooms requires leadership that embodies the very same dispositions and strategies that we are asking teachers to do.

[23:07]

And I would say the place to practice great inquiry instruction as a school leader are these things called staff meetings. When you assemble a group of people physically together in the same room, it's got to be something different than just sharing information. So I would challenge school leaders to think about how they design staff meetings as inquiry experiences. And there are all sorts of ideas in the book to do that. But how do you get your staff to start talking to each other and asking appropriate questions, backing up their sources of information, creating together, playing soccer together and developing that community, that healthy school community. So I think this is a book that brings people together.

[23:53]

And I also really intentionally did not write a textbook about Because a textbook to me is akin to a lecture. I wanted this to be co-created. So it is designed for people to write in and draw in and ask questions in.

[24:09] Kimberly Mitchell:

It strikes me as also relevant to one of perhaps the most important but also most dreaded activities that we do besides leading staff meetings. and that is having post-conferences with teachers after observing in their classrooms. And I noticed that so many of the experiences are how questions. How can you support innovative student thinking? How do you start project-based learning? How do you get students to think more?

[24:33]

And I've noticed that by default, administrators tend to ask why questions when they're inquiring about a teacher's thinking. But when you inquire directly like that and you say, tell me why did you do this? Why did you do that? it triggers defensiveness. But when you ask a how question, you actually get the explanation and thinking that you're looking for. So I love that they're framed that way.

[24:56]

And I think these different experiences would be fabulous practice and a fabulous stretching of the intellectual muscles that we use in teacher post conferences or, you know, those meetings with teachers where we talk about their practice. So yeah. I love that. And I think that's absolutely great advice to see this as a tool for administrators as well as teachers. So the book is Experience Inquiry, Five Powerful Strategies, 50 Practical Experiences. And Kimberly, if people want to find out more about your work or connect with you online, where's the best place for them to find you?

[25:32] Kimberly Mitchell:

Oh, head over to our website, inquirypartners.com. And all the information is right there. And I hope to connect.

[25:39] Kimberly Mitchell:

Well, Kimberly, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[25:42] Kimberly Mitchell:

My pleasure, Justin. Thanks for having me.

[25:44] Announcer:

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