Running a Community of Inquiry

Once the trigger material had been presented, the Community of Inquiry commences. 

The major features of this method are:

1. Ask the children what they found interesting or puzzling about the story or other 
   experience. Encourage them to make their comments in the form of a question. Gather 
   the children's questions on the board, writing the name of the child who asked each one 
   after the question.
2. Discuss the questions in an order decided by one of a variety of methods - we might 
   vote for the most interesting question, try to group similar questions to see the area of 
   major interest, weed out the questions that have easy answers or which are impossible to 
   answer on the evidence we have and so on.
3. Rules for the discussion can be decided by the community, either in advance or after 
   some experience of the community. In one class, for example, five rules were decided on 
   by the community before the first discussion. They were: be quiet when not speaking to 
   the community, only one speaker at a time, listen to the speaker, don't play about, speak 
   up loudly when you are the speaker.
4. The teacher's role is that of a facilitator. Basically, it is to provoke and model the 
   moves made by experienced thinkers in their own best thinking, avoiding the 
   teacher's common roles as source of knowledge and instant evaluator of student 
   responses (the community takes on these roles). Some of the major techniques 
   here: the use of increased wait times, avoidance of judgmental comments, the 
   exhibition of teacher puzzlement, and the judicious use of questioning that signals 
   the cognitive moves that might usefully be made next and concentrates children's 
   attention on metacognition (thinking about their own thinking).
5. The impact of the physical setting of a circle on the establishment of a community is 
   reinforced by the encouragement of participants to talk to the whole circle, or directly to the person they are answering, rather than always through the teacher. Whilst it can be necessary, especially with a newly established group, to insist on hands being, raised before speaking, it is certainly an aim of the teacher to develop turn taking skills, so that the discussion follows a more normal conversation dynamic. Deciding how far to allow a noisy interchange to continue before insisting on one speaker at a time is one of the 
   teacher's major judgments.
6. The teacher is a member of the community and hence has a duty to participate in the 
   discussion. However, traditional roles of teachers mean that any input they make will 
   carry greater weight than the contributions of students. Hence it is important for the 
   teacher to hold back in matters of fact and opinion if there is a good chance that the 
   students may come up with an acceptable answer with suitable encouragement or given 
   time. Lipman often says the teacher should be 'pedagogically strong but philosophically 
   self-effacing'. Of course, there are times when teacher input is just what the discussion 
   needs; deciding when and how to do this form part of the professional judgment of the 
   teacher, guided by knowledge of the group and the prior consideration of the issues 
   involved. It need not, however, always be in the form of a dogmatic statement.
7. The teacher needs to encourage a recognition in the community that many 
   questions are complex and not amenable to simple, quick answers, so time has to 
   be provided for talking around problems. Clarification of what the problem is 
   must be recognised as valuable, even if no answer is found; premature closure of 
   questions is to be avoided. 
8. Children must be encouraged to take responsibility for their comments and be 
   prepared to defend, modify or change them as appropriate. The teacher needs to 
   ensure that attacks on positions are not made or seen as attacks on the holders of the 
   positions.

by Tim Sprod

Holistic Education Network of Tasmania, Australia
www.neat.tas.edu.au/HENT 
Free to use for educational purposes but please acknowledge source.