Big Ideas from Hop, Skip, Leapfrog: “Engagement Through Inquiry”

Diana Laufenberg is the Executive Director at Inquiry Schools, a nonprofit working to create and support student-centered learning environments that are inquiry-driven, project-based and utilize modern technology. For 16 years, Diana was a secondary social studies teacher in Wisconsin, Kansas, Arizona and Pennsylvania. She most recently taught at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia, an inquiry-driven, project-based high school focused on modern learning. Diana has also been consulting for eight years, and two times throughout her tenure, she has taken on long-term substitute gigs to continually keep her in touch with the classroom and all of the challenges it has to offer.

As part of our Hop, Skip, Leapfrog interviews with subject-matter experts across the K-12 field, we asked her to weigh in on education opportunities in a post-pandemic world. Read on to discover three big ideas pulled directly from a transcription of our conversation, in Diana Laufenberg’s own words.

Takeaway #1: The dynamics of learning need to shift away from classroom management and compliance to a focus on student-centered, inquiry-based learning opportunities to ensure true engagement.

“At SLA in Philadelphia last year, when they finished the year, basically the deal the school district made with all the kids was that your grades can't get worse than when you left school on March 13. So, you can only improve your grades, and as you would imagine, when you take a compliance-based system away and they don't have to do anything, many kids choose not to, with one surprising exception. One thing that every kid still did was their senior capstone project, which is completely student-driven. Students design it from start to finish, and it is all up to them. It’s the culmination of their four years of being at school, and they didn't have to do it, given the new grading rule, but all 120 of them still did it. What I really took away from that was that the thing that did sustain through all of this craziness was the thing that was most student-centered and the most student-driven because it was in the core of who a kid was, and that's what mattered to them in the end. When you took away all the compliance, all the hoop-jumping, and all of the stuff that school is, that's still what they were invested in finishing for themselves. And that was a really interesting thing to note, because it was the only thing that went ‘easy-ish’ at the end for that school community.

This supports what I had been noticing, and what many teachers picked up on very quickly, which is that a lot of American schools run on the willingness of a kid to be nice and the discomfort that comes from not doing what is expected when you are in physical proximity to another human. Being nice and the fear of discomfort are two things that often make the bulk of American school classrooms feel like school and move forward. So, when you take students out of physical proximity from their teacher, and you have been relying on compliance measures for work – instead of designing student-centered, inquiry-driven, interesting experiences for students – they don't engage, and they won't do the work because they no longer have the pressure of discomfort or stress of doing what they are told. With the shift to remote learning, those compliance measures went away. The dynamics of those changing so dramatically, so quickly – the kids were like, ‘Oh, I can kind of opt out of this, I can turn my camera off, and nothing can stop me. And it doesn't have to be uncomfortable for me not to do the work anymore, so I am not going to do it.’ [This] was a student's way of giving feedback. On the flipside, educators and leaders noticed when they connected their content to either something that was about the kid or meant something to the kid, they got very different feedback.

For me, what was fascinating about much of this was just how much of a proof case it was about why student-centered, inquiry-driven [learning] is so powerful … it isn't compliance-driven in the same way, though a part of it is still transactional. You're still at school, sure, but when the instruction is student-driven, you'll see students interact and engage fully. However, I actually do feel like there is a ramp into something better here based on what we now know about these kids and what actually motivates them to engage in learning from an authentic place. This is powerful feedback and helps educators understand the dynamics of learning versus the dynamics of classroom management and compliance in a very different way.”

Takeaway #2: There's a ‘Goldilocks’ zone of inquiry that should be challenging, achievable, and relevant to students’ interests.

There is an art to finding that [‘right’] place with your content. I'm not sure everybody sticks with inquiry long enough to find that place and has the stomach for figuring it out as you [test] it, get feedback, make changes, and then move forward with a set of kids. I mean, there's no better way to teach, period, as long as you believe in it. But you have to believe in it, and half the time, people don't. They are told they're supposed to believe in it, and then they say, ‘Oh, I tried it. It didn't work.’ And then they give up. It's going to go as well as anything people don't actually want to do. If you don't want to play basketball, you're not going to be good at basketball – telling you to go play doesn't make you good at the game if you don't want to be good at the game.

One year, I had my kids pitch project ideas based on StudentCam, which came out of C-SPAN every year. Immediately I had a couple of boys come up, and they were not the top students in the class – very smart but not overly ‘school-ey.’ They came up and [said,] ‘We want to focus on drugs for our project.’ And I was like, ‘Well, good boys – come on, no. Go away.’ And they came up the next day and [said] it again. In my mind, I had decided they were going to be [focusing on the] legalization of weed because these boys have frequently talked about it in our government or history classes. Finally, they [told me,] ‘We’ve got a better idea, and you need to let us do it.’ They actually showed up with some sources and a rough outline, and they went off and created probably the best three minutes of video I've ever seen kids create – period.

They had put together an incredibly compelling piece in 2011 about how America had a problem with prescription drugs and painkillers, and we were not paying attention – and that this was about to wreck America. This was 2011, and two sixteen-year-old boys – super compelling three minutes of video they put together that told a story. They [played] commercials for drugs over a script that was saying, ‘We're addicted to something here, and we're not being critical consumers of the data around what we're actually doing to ourselves.’ But it was always the drug ad that was saying the ‘pro’ message without the text of it. It was... the images – one right after the other. This was and continues to be probably one of the most compelling things I've ever seen kids put together. Point being, if I had continued to quash [their enthusiasm] – what I call the ‘joy-killing’ that teachers do sometimes when they decide that they know better than the kids, I would have done it. I try really hard to police that in myself. They would have done another project, and it would have been perfectly fine, but it wouldn't have been extraordinary. They had a story to tell. They saw something I didn't and knew how to do that in a way that I couldn't have done.

In order to do something compelling, it has to have that level of inquiry [within] it, where it values the student's questions. It doesn't have to be about the kid, but it does have to be about what the kid finds interesting. When you get kids truly curious about the work that they're doing, they no longer see it as work. You don't get rid of it completely, but it does surrender a huge portion of that compliance-based ‘stuff’ to authentic interaction with learning, and they become true learners.

Takeaway #3: We are engaged in our own inquiry project at both a global and local level – and your classroom is the most finite version of it.

Inquiry learning isn't just the project, it is not just the inquiry topic – it is, in fact, the building of specific skills, the exposure to content that helps a student have a foundation for inquiry while also drawing from their own experiences. [It’s] about building skills to communicate and tackle [work], in addition to a student pursuing a meaningful question that produces something. These kids who can tell me how they want to show evidence – they're learning, it matters. You can give [students] projects that can be cookie-cutter [but] then the products all look alike. You can see that they have maybe transferred knowledge or hit whatever rigor score you're using, but if you want authentic application, analysis, and upper-level thinking, you get there through truly asking kids something interesting and then letting them run with that, with just enough information to get them curious. But again, not everybody gets it, and not everyone wants to get it.

This is the same with teaching – I don't get it when teachers are uninterested in treating their own profession like their inquiry project. All year, I kept saying to our teachers, ‘We are globally engaged in a career driven project that we do not know an outcome to, but we have to keep questioning … keep trying … keep getting feedback ... iterating and doing a very tight cycle of that so we [stay] relevant and keep this thing moving.

If you want to talk about what we need to be thinking about with leaders at all levels, it’s how [to] engage in a very rigorous reflection on what just happened, much like we are asking our students to do. [We then need to] get to the core of what we actually find. We’re such a profession geared toward the forward motion that it's so hard to look back sometimes and actually be reflective about what happened, why it happened, what went right, what went wrong, why it went right, why it went wrong, [and] what … we do next. Getting into that… reflective practice could be one of the biggest positive outcomes from all of this. We have to be much more reflective and iterative in what we think about and how we do our work – and also [in] how we listen to feedback from students on what they need to learn.

This blog is one in a series describing interviews from TLA’s Hop, Skip, Leapfrog project. Explore more resources.