VIT Podcast THE INQUIRY PROCESS: OVERVIEW Welcome to this VIT podcast. This is the 2nd in a series where we hear from teachers in the workplace talking about their work. My name is Damian Cowell. This podcast looks at the Inquiry process undertaken by teachers in order to move from provisional to full registration. I talked to eight first - third year teachers: Natalie Ognenis, Daniel Glasson, Julie Glass, Trevor Spaliaras, Anne McDonald. Nicole Butcher, Melissa Goodger and Vicky De Rome about their Inquiry. They gave some valuable advice on how to choose your Inquiry focus, what kind of evidence to collect along the way, how to present to the panel, and what benefits they gained from completing the process. Here are some highlights from our conversations. The first topic we covered was how to choose your Inquiry question. If you work in a school, there might be a whole school focus, for instance literacy, that you can tap into to help you decide what your focus will be. So I asked the teachers if they felt this approach could help: Yeah definitely, finding a focus that the school has, it makes it a lot easier to find those support systems or those professional readings about what you're doing to help you with your Inquiry question. Yeah well it saves you doing double the work. I mean you already have so many things you need to do anyway, and if you can make your focus the same as your school's focus it just makes a lot more sense, streamlines the process. They also talked about the importance of a narrow focus, not to make your question too broad: "Yeah so I think if it's too broad then you're not really able to define what you're looking at and it becomes a little more difficult. If you've got something that's really pinpointed at a certain area then you're able to find strategies a lot easier, you're able to differentiate a little bit better, you're also able to focus on a particular group of students rather than a whole class or a whole load of strategies where you're finding it hard to pick and choose." "I think because it was so broad I had times where I had difficulty knowing exactly what I should focus on. I had so many different ideas of what I could do with that sort of question. I was trying to, in my teaching, I was trying to use so many different differentiation techniques and include lots of activities and it was really good because I was able to trial lots of different things, but it did make it harder to scope in on one specific thing. I think if I was to re-do it, I would have scoped in a little bit more, made my question not so broad, but focused more on one thing, so that's something that I would recommend that people do, is to choose something really more specific. Even though you have a lot more to talk about with a broader topic, I think it does make it almost harder to do it." Well I think as a teacher and particularly as a new teacher, there's so many things that you want to improve and to learn, and it s not that helpful to try and improve everything at once, so just focusing on one thing can help you to get settled and it s better to become a bit of an expert in the one area, rather than a jack of all trades." "It's too hard to write about, it's too hard to gather evidence because you don't know what you're gathering evidence on. You need to know exactly what you're looking for, so you need focus."
A common theme emerged: don't stress! "I think it was quite smooth sailing. Once you do have your Inquiry question and you are happy with it, it is quite smooth sailing, because you are basically just documenting what you do every day. You go along, you're doing your differentiation or you're putting in place some engaging curriculum or activities, that's what you're doing in your classroom every day, you're just putting it together in a document to say this is what I'm doing and ticking the right boxes." "The thing that made it stressful for me was the fact that I was thinking that it was stressful. But once I stopped thinking that it was stressful, it's basically what you're doing in your practice, every day. So it's not a stressful thing because you're doing it every day, you're literally just writing what you're doing and how you're addressing those kids' needs." "Not to stress about it, I think that's a major one. At the beginning there was heaps of anticipation around it, I didn't really know what to expect, I didn't really know how to go about documenting everything, but then once you actually look at the process and the VIT website as well with the little clips that you can play on how to go about answering each section, and talking to other colleagues, I think the process is simple in the fact that you do represent those standards in your teaching as a day to day thing, it's just documenting it. And you pretty much re-tell what you've done when you write it down." "The important thing to remember is this - it's you showing a process of how not necessarily you've progressed in that year, but how you've worked things out and what you've got from it. That s all it is, it's just a process. It's not a test to see if you're good enough to be a teacher, have you passed this test? It's not that, it's showing how you ve navigated round that first year or the second year of teaching, what are some of the things you've found, whether you've solved something or not. You don't have to solve something it's just the journey isn't it, rather than I've done this and this has been successful." "It pretty much runs in with what you're doing in your classroom, so you should always choose something that you're already doing because then I think that the process is a lot simpler. The only extra thing is that you documenting it, which you essentially do anyway when you reflect on your teaching which you should be doing." "I think if you're feeling stressed talking to people is really good because there's lots of people out there who have done this before, your mentor, they were a first year teacher once, they know exactly how it feels. So that's an important thing to remember, that a lot of your colleagues around you they ve been through this process, they've done it they know what you're going through, so there's support out there if you need it." "You're actually doing this 24/7, you're completing your VIT, it's ongoing, you're doing it every year, when you get into your second or third year you're doing PDP - it's just a natural thing that happens as a teacher, so don't be stressed out that you've got to document it a little bit more. Be proud of it, take a bit of ownership in it, it's something that will stay with you for the rest of your life." I asked the teachers what they thought were the benefits of completing the Inquiry. "So with this (Inquiry) question I feel like it's helped me with my planning. At the beginning of the year it was more like you've got to move through the curriculum, there wasn't a real focus on making sure that each student had a realistic goal to reach. So with this question I believe now that I'm able to cater for all of my learners and also the types of learners they are. Because I think that sometimes we hit those high kids and we hit the low kids, but we miss out on those middle kids. The kids that are achieving, they're passing, they're doing ok and we sometimes forget about targeting those kids and helping them reach that next level. So I feel like now I'm more conscious of that."
"I really felt like I'd learnt so much about myself as a teacher, about how to better teach my students throughout the whole process. It was so beneficial for me as an early teacher and there was lots that I was able to then take on for the next term. I found that after doing the process and doing my Inquiry question, then the next term I started implementing new things into my teaching from what I'd learnt. Straight away I was like I need to do this and I should do that. So it helped so much." "What I learned is it's really important to ask questions. If you're stuck, ask for advice and respond to the feedback that you get with your practice. I think the best part of the VIT was the fact that you have people observe you and you could use that to then change your practice and adapt from it. I thought that was really handy. Also in terms of writing it up, I think the best thing to do is to pick your learners before you pick your question. For me I thought that worked really well because I picked my learners and then it s like ok what am I going to focus on. I noticed that these were the kids that whenever we had a reading session they were the ones that had the book upside down, they were the ones who were not really focused. So I chose them first and then I chose my question around what they needed and I thought that was a really handy thing to do." "I feel like I accomplished something. I took something that was just a question and I turned it into pretty much a unit of work and I also think it s really important that I've learned how to reflect effectively on my teaching." "In terms of the engagement, because that was part of my question, it's still something that I try to do every single Maths lesson. I want to engage my students because Maths is something that kids if they don't have confidence, they don't feel like they're good at Maths, then they're easily disengaged. So it s something I'm trying every single day. I love trying new things in the classroom to engage my students and you take it away from Maths as well. My question wasn't to do with Maths, you start engaging you try to use different strategies to engage and differentiate in other areas of the curriculum as well." "Work with something that you're really interested in and that you're doing every day anyway. There's no point picking an Inquiry question that you have no relationships with your students on or that you have to do heaps of research and then you're not really applying it, because that defeats the purpose. You need to do something that you do every day." "For me, what I learnt most from doing the process and what I continue to learn from, is how important it is to have those relationships with the kids, but also with the parents especially in the early years. That's what I got most out of my VIT, was to develop those relationships and also to cater your curriculum to the individual needs. If you need to change it, change it. You re there for their benefit, you're not there to say ok yes I need to dot this T, you're actually there for their benefit. So that's what I actually got out of it and that's what I continue to use in my practice." "In this school I learnt that when presenting information it s always important to allow students to apply the information. I think at the beginning I was getting caught up in explaining it and making sure my instructions were correct and giving just written work, when instead in this school environment, I think that getting students up and about and applying their learning in kinaesthetic ways helped the learner to retain the information." "I think it made me more reflective and I think it s allowed me to look at those materials, particularly the ones I was using during this unit plan, to look back at them and improve them now that I'm teaching the same year level again and the same concepts. It's happening a lot more quickly this year. The children are understanding the concepts a lot more quickly, which is a bit of a relief." We talked about the benefits of working with your colleagues. Observing them, having them observe you, formal meetings and even just asking questions. "Working with my mentor was really good because he's my team teaching partner, so we teach next to each other. There is a wall, but you are able to gain different tips from
him because you are teaching the same subjects or similar subjects. In addition to that, he is really supportive, you can email him questions or you can talk to him face to face and he's able to if he doesn't know the answer, he will go out of his way to find that answer. So I think that's really beneficial. And also knowing that, as a graduate teacher, you can use other support systems, not just your mentor. You can ask other experienced teachers or even graduate teachers about the process." "My office was really good, they'd already been through the process so they were always great for tips and tricks to get through it. We had a large amount of graduate students at the college as well. They were great to lean on as well, not so much for strategies but just talk about the process, just talking about it with somebody I think definitely helps. So where you are at or what have you done or what are you up to, and you can sort of gauge where you should be up to as well, because we're all going through it at the same time so I think I was able to have those conversations and it just helped me tick the boxes as we went along with those other graduates." "Broaden your horizons - you've just come out of university so you've got that network of people that you already know from university that you can tap into in your first year of teaching. It shouldn't just be about what your school is doing, it should be about what's best practice for the children that you're teaching. And it's just bringing in various examples from everywhere, from the internet - google it if you need to, google a different way to get a kid interested in doing something. But I found speaking to colleagues at other schools was really helpful. And we were lucky in my office last year, all of us were members of the 2-1 team, so I had a whole office of people that I could bounce ideas off. So I had my mentors - we team teach in the early years so we deliver the content together and our two classes completely combined, so there's no A and B, it's one united group, so it was great having someone that I could learn off all the time but it was also great to speak to other people who I wasn't teaching with as well." "A key point that I leant was probably to use those people around you, actually ask questions because there's no silly questions at all. You're not going to be thought of as a lesser person if you show a bit of a - not an insecurity, but an innocence about you that you're actually willing to accept advice and even constructive criticism." "It's good to have someone you can just ask really quite simple questions." I guess the main thing was seeing the relationships, the different relationships between the different teachers. I made sure that I observed a huge array of teachers, primary and secondary. It was really good for me to be able to go into a year 12 class and see how that teacher worked with 17 year olds, as well as 7 year olds with this teacher. When it came to actually honing in on the Inquiry, so, feedback, I witnessed a lot of informal feedback, and classroom feedback. But I then went back to those teachers and got them to show me - How do you actually physically, with this paper give them, where do you put the feedback? Is it all on Compass? Is it digital? Is it all on paper? Do you hand write it? Do you type it? Do you copy and paste - do you cheat? What is it that you do? Because these teachers are fifteen, twenty years of experience, so they must have worked out this way that works for them. Well I'd like to take what he's done and change it with what she did and eventually just came up with my own way of doing it. Watching other people has got to be the best way to learn, actually getting in there and watching what they do. " "What I learned is it's really important to ask the question. If you're stuck ask for advice and respond to the feedback that you get with your practice. I think that the best part of the VIT is the fact that you have people observe you and you could use that to then change your practice and adapt from it. So I thought that that was really handy." "Just those little check-ins, they made a world of difference. Just to know that someone's actually there for me and I can approach them. Also having those set meetings, where this is what our goals are going to be before we meet up specifically gain. So it allowed me to not look at this portfolio as one big piece of work, it was like let's break it down, let's just get it done bit by bit." "It's nice to observe other classes and recognise that some of the things you're doing are pretty standard, they're acceptable, teaching practice. So to see that other experienced teachers have some similar pedagogical approaches, but it's also of course useful to see new things, and my mentor encouraged me to try and take just one thing away from each class that I observed, which reinforces the idea to stay focused on that
one thing. So I was able to incorporate some new ideas in my teaching. I know that my mentor is a fantastic German teacher and is very experienced. And one thing that students really love about his teaching is that he approaches the classes with such enthusiasm and momentum, and even with something like a grammar topic that might seem a little bit dry to some students, he'll ask students to gather in together, he'll move them physically in the room, get them to come in closely and there's something about his energy which is infectious. And he'll draw things up on the whiteboard and things will be moving and he might even throw a ball around the room to ask a student a question and they'll have to throw the ball to someone else and it's fast paced and exciting. So I tried to incorporate that a little bit into my teaching although, of course, I have a different style." "I learnt from observing these students how they interact with the teacher when it's approached a little bit differently. I learnt that sometimes you don't need to give every student the same method of approach, so to provide it differently. So for example, I purchased a little mini-whiteboard for my student with special learning needs and he didn't look at the main whiteboard whatsoever, he had his own little whiteboard and that was what we used to keep a bit of structure in the lesson. "It was really good actually it was chance for me to show off a little bit. This is what we do, this is the work that the students are doing. What do you think? So rather than it be someone's coming in to observe me and test me, it was more an opportunity for me to say look how wonderful Kiana's work is, look how wonderful Fin's work is. Soon the kind of focus felt like it was off me and what I was doing as a teacher and more what they're producing and the feel of the classroom and things like that. "Most of the graduates were working on it at the same time and I actually did meet up with one other graduate to sort of, you know you get a gauge of where you're at, where your question's at. What have you done in the meantime over the course of 2/3 weeks when we were given the task of right, it's time to begin. And what it did was reaffirm that I'm on the right track, just bit by bit. And I actually was able to use a similar method of presenting my data. I wasn't familiar with how to put it into a graph and make it presentable, and I learnt how to do that through my colleague and that's something that moving forward, I can do once again." "Definitely lean on your colleagues. Whether they've been through the VIT process or they're currently going through the VIT process. You're going to get advice doesn't matter where it comes from, so definitely lean on all those colleagues. I think the thing that I most learnt out of it was you understand all of a sudden how much we as teachers do to enhance student learning and how to enhance their growth and it's a really cool thing to sit back after the end of it and think we actually do all this every single day. It was quite cool to sit down and reflect on all that." What kinds of evidence did they collect along the way? "The main evidence that I collected would have been my pre-tests which I ran like an investigation tasks. We did a lesson around inferencing and then we did a quick write, which is basically students just writing down the information they retained. So I collected that to show where my students started, and that also helped with grouping my students into my high, medium and low. I also each lesson collected some form of exit pass which then helped me to create a rubric to follow, which then gave me the evidence of the end after doing the post-test, to be able to show the growth of students throughout the Inquiry question." "I used some unit plans and I changed some unit plans a little bit to help with that differentiation, so I used that as part of my evidence. Pre and post-test data, just collating that together and working out where they were beforehand and where they were after the process. I felt that was really good feedback for myself in terms of how well I had engaged them with the curriculum and how well I had differentiated the curriculum. So I feel the pre and post-tests were a great piece of evidence for me. I had student work samples as well just to sort of feed off - you've got it right in front of you and you can see how they went along the way, so that was really handy. I also had plenty of photos of the programs or activities that I put in place in my classroom to help engage the students, because it's a little bit hard to say the students were engaged, whereas if you've got
photos of them enjoying themselves on an activity or a particular ICT program, then it shows they were engaged, they look like they were having fun. So it was sort of a way to measure it I guess." "Prior to beginning my Inquiry I looked at the AusVELS levels of my students. I also am running records, we do sight word recognition, letter ID, so it was all that summative, but it was also my observations of the kids in the classroom. Once I chose my learners, I just sat back and just watched them. And just made little notes of what they're doing in the classroom throughout the day, to sort of figure out what they were like and then from there that's what I planned the sort of activities that I was doing based on my summative and I had my formative assessment." "We used probe testing which is a reading comprehension task, coupled with teacher judgement on the reports in the previous years and even just my own judgement in the first term of teaching, just gauging how they went on their assessments. I was actually modifying work for my learner with special needs prior to conducting the VIT process." "The unit plan that I put together went into my evidence. I had students complete reflection forms on how they were going and what they wanted to learn more about or what they wanted revise more in class. I observed some of my mentor's classes and other teacher's classes and I made notes on what I learnt in those classes and that went into my evidence as well. I collected other work samples and particular extension tasks. I wrote down some things that I heard students say in my classes, about how they were going and it sounds like a lot, but I think these are the sort of things that you already have anyway." "I collected quite a lot of evidence. I didn't end up using all of it, I just collected things along the way so I had it there if I needed it. I collected student work - I'd collect their workbooks. I would photocopy or scan their work in workbooks, assignments as well. I also collected things like email communication with parents. I was working with a student with a disability, and one thing that I did was I stayed in contact with that student's parent, so I would sometimes send through things like assignments to make sure the parent was aware of upcoming assignments, just to keep them in the loop. I kept email communication, I also kept things like interviews with other teachers, conversations with other teachers and student surveys as well. I conducted a survey at the end of term which I found very, very useful. I was able to ask a few questions, I just used Survey Monkey, just one of those survey forms like that, and it was really useful and interesting to read each of their responses and get their personal feedback. It was totally anonymous as well, which meant that they were very honest in the feedback they gave and I could ask them about which activities they liked the most, what didn't they really like doing through the term, what helped them learn, whether they felt like they were being supported, as well. And I learnt a lot from that, getting their individual feedback, whether they felt like they were being supported throughout the term, when I was trying to differentiate in the classroom. So that was really useful. I do recommend conducting a survey with your class because you do learn a lot from student feedback." "I collected the background of the students, so we looked at the cultural background of the school, then looking at each student. And I inserted some of the work that we did, some samples of their work, some samples of the feedback that I gave them. I also interviewed three of the five students that I selected on camera to ask them how they see a teacher's feedback and what they get from the teacher's feedback, what do they then do with that feedback. I kind of knew the answer already, but I guess I just wanted to ask them and get their opinion. That's what this is all about, it's about asking the student, not me telling them. I enjoyed interviewing the three students and it was also something to put up on the presentation. Really it was mainly work samples, feedback, other people's samples of feedback and the interview." And finally, what was it like presenting in front of a panel? "It was very informal. There was nibbles on the table. It was in a meeting room with a screen, with everything set up, but it was a nice chat, it really was an informal chat like they said it was going to be. I didn't feel like I had to sell myself. The VIT leader asked me lots of questions, he was genuinely interested in my Inquiry, as was everybody sat round the table. And it felt really supported and just a really relaxed atmosphere, rather
than an interview. I will always now tell my teachers that I'm mentoring that actually, this is your opportunity to say look at what I've been doing this year, I find it really interesting what do you think, and that's about as much selling as you need to do of yourself. It's not this presentation where you stand up, everybody stayed sat down, like I said we had drinks, it was completely different than what I expected." "I guess the best way to prepare is to just know your portfolio, just read through it, know where each section is. I created a little document with all the VIT boxes, basically all the standards, I ticked off all the areas that I'd done, I noted where all the areas that were within my portfolio, so it might have had something to do with differentiation in the curriculum, that might have been on page 10, and that way I could talk to my document in a way, so if there was a question asked about that particular area I knew straight where to go to in my portfolio. The best advice is to know your portfolio, which you will because you've spent hours and hours on it, and it's basically just going through your document." "At the end of the day you've done the process, you've written it up, you've had support from your mentor and experienced teachers, so with that behind you I think that gives you confidence in order to present. "It really is a chance for you to show off some of really cool stuff that you've discovered over the year - cool or daunting things that you've gone through over that year, that's all it is." "I was a little bit nervous going into it, I'd prepared some things prior, I'd spent almost six months on the Inquiry project so I felt like I knew it pretty well, going into it. A few nerves comes with things like that, but it was fine, once I got in and I started talking I stopped feeling nervous and it was actually quite an easy process in the end. I found it quite nice to do. And it was a good way to reflect on the work that I'd done as well just to sit there and talk about it with a panel of people. It really made you think about the work you've done and what you really had learnt from the process." "It did feel like I could share the experience as being a first year out teacher, but also maybe show people something that they'd not considered. A way of doing something that perhaps might help them as well. It was a good experience. Not what I was expecting." "Walking into the panel and just having my mentor there and Assistant Principal was well, and just being told hey this is just you showing what you've done and that was the best part about it. I could present something that I'm proud of, and then you just start talking, it starts rolling and before you know it you're smiling and laughing and it's all said and done." "I think once you go through the process and you sit down with the panel, the Assistant Principal goes look, you've done all this work and without realising, this is what you do on a daily basis. And as Trevor mentioned, you do feel proud about it, and it sort of reassures you that you are on the right track and that you're doing the right thing in the classroom every day." I hope you found some helpful tips there that you can apply if you re about to begin you re Inquiry process. Thanks once again to Natalie, Daniel, Julie, Trevor and Nicole, Melissa and Vicky for sharing their thoughts. You can hear their full podcasts elsewhere on this page.