Inquiry-in-Community Protocol

Purpose

Inquiry-in-community treats uncertainty as shared professional work rather than a private deficit. The goal is not to give the presenter an answer, but to help the group surface assumptions, develop interpretations, and create a thoughtful next move.

Before you begin: choose a facilitator and timekeeper. One person brings a real dilemma, not a hypothetical case. The presenter owns the final interpretation and next move. Participants critique ideas and practices, not the worth of the practitioner. Advice is delayed until the group has clarified and interpreted the situation.

The protocol

• Bring a moment — 5 minutes — The presenter describes one concrete dilemma, interaction, decision, or tension from practice. Include enough context to understand it, but resist explaining it away.
• Clarify before solving — 5 minutes — Others ask factual or contextual questions only. Who was involved? What happened immediately before? What responsibility did you hold? What constraints were present?
• Surface assumptions — 8 minutes — The group identifies assumptions embedded in the situation: about teaching, teacher learning, authority, expertise, equity, responsibility, knowledge, or what good practice should look like.
• Offer alternative readings — 8 minutes — Participants offer different interpretations. Use language such as another way to read this might be… or I wonder whether… Avoid turning interpretations into prescriptions.
• Generate possibilities — 5 minutes — Only now consider possible responses, questions, tools, or experiments. Aim for multiple possibilities rather than one best answer.
• Re-enter practice — 3 minutes — The presenter names one thing to try, notice, ask, or investigate. The move should be small enough to enact.
• Return — at the next meeting — Revisit the dilemma. What happened? What changed in your interpretation? What new uncertainty emerged?

Useful inquiry moves

• Clarify — What were you noticing at that moment?
• Surface — What assumption about teacher learning might be operating here?
• Complicate — What might someone else in the situation see differently?
• Connect — What larger program, institutional, or relational condition is shaping this?
• Reframe — What changes if we treat this as a learning problem rather than a performance problem?
• Experiment — What is one small thing you could try and then bring back to the group?