Deconstructing Inquiry in the Professional Development School: Exploring the Domains and Contents of Teachers' Questions

Questions they ask: considering teacher-inquiry questions posed by pre-service English teachers

“…PSTs' questions grew amid all these pressures, inevitably influenced by the various environments in which PSTs worked and lived. Still, although their questions might have focused on various teaching practices, including those in Dana, Yendol-Hoppey, and Snow-Gerono's (2006) taxonomy, PSTs overwhelmingly focused questions on individual students, even when project assignments did not require this. This focus itself suggests PSTs' concerns about teaching individuals.…”

“…Only two other categories emerged: beliefs about management and intersection of teachers' identities -and those questions were still within the context of helping specific students. It is unclear why even questions where the assignment did not stipulate helping individual children still focused on individuals, but a possibility is that our data-set included only PSTs, while Dana, Yendol-Hoppey, and Snow-Gerono (2006) also studied experienced teachers, perhaps better able to pose questions about issues such as curriculum or teaching strategies.…”

“…PSTs -exposed to, but not specifically trained in, quantitative forms of research -might believe neutrality is a quality indicator for all research, similarly to how Reis-Jorge's (2007) participants regarded their work as inferior to other research forms. We might help Samantha and others by ensuring that we and our colleagues teach PSTs that teacher-inquirers are not required to divorce themselves from prior knowledge of students but instead to examine that knowledge in light of new findings through intentional research methods (Dana, Yendol-Hoppey, and Snow-Gerono 2006).…”

“…Consequently, we must support PSTs in exploring varied teaching identities (Dana, Yendol-Hoppey, and Snow-Gerono 2006), helping them adopt roles fitting PSTs' personalities, while helping them understand that teachers construct complicated identities (Olsen 2011), assuming not only the authority-figure role PSTs often mentioned in questions but many other roles as well. In preparing PSTs specifically to practice inquiry, we must usher PSTs away from a view of 'teacher as enforcer' toward an identity as a teacher-researcher (Goodnough 2010) in which collaborative inquiry, with students as partners, is possible (Villacañas de Castro 2014).…”

Identifying the Priorities and Practices of Virtual School Educators Using Action Research

“…For example, analysis of more than two hundred action research questions studied within a professional development school (PDS) revealed that passions and priorities often fell into categories, such as efforts to meet the needs of an individual child, interests in whether a particular curriculum or teaching strategy is working, explorations of the learning environment set up by the teacher, or classroom management practices (Dana, Yendol-Hoppey, and Snow-Gerono 2006). This information was used to frame efforts within the PDS and to support teachers outside the PDS in conducting action research.…”