Abstract:
School leaders are charged with the responsibility of working in ways that improve all students' outcomes. The quality of a teacher’s practice can positively affect a student’s success at school and their life beyond school. The New Zealand Curriculum promotes Teaching-as-Inquiry as a framework to examine and implement effective practice. Many schools have used the framework to develop school-wide inquiry routines relevant to their context. This research examined the professional inquiry conversations (PICs) between leaders and teachers in one Auckland secondary school. Three consecutive conversations of five leader-teacher pairs were recorded and transcribed, and all participants were then individually interviewed. The analysis of PIC transcripts focused on both conversation content and on the extent to which the conversation approach was Open-to-Learning (Argyris & Schön, 1974; Robinson, 1993). Interview transcripts were analysed to identify the role of participants’ theories-in-use in explaining their conversation behaviours (Robinson & Lai, 2006). The findings revealed in all cases conversation content mainly attended to focusing inquiry matters and focused least on learning inquiry matters. The extent the PIC content was framed by the school inquiry routine depended on how control was shared in the conversation. In addition participants who valued the routine as a mechanism for their learning followed the routine in their conversations more closely. Typically leaders' PIC approaches were consistent with Closed-to-Learning in order to avoid differences that might threaten leaderteacher relationships. The nature of the PICs between leaders and teachers affects how individuals commit, comply and value their inquiry work together. These findings have implications for the professional training given to middle leaders so leaders' can work more effectively with differences and deepen teacher inquiry.
