What is Inquiry

Inquiry is a method of professional development that gives faculty and staff the flexibility to research issues that they’ve seen or experienced in their work. Rather than prescribe particular best practices or research what other people are doing first, inquiry puts students, the subjects of our study, first.

Funding by the Basic Skills Initiative and the Title III grant, the Teaching and Learning Center is using an inquiry process to:

  • Create a culture of collaboration;
  • Strengthen teaching through inquiry and research;
  • Improve staff and faculty understanding of student learning;
  • Document the findings to plan future workshops, projects, and plans.

Spring 2010 Faculty/Staff Inquiry Groups at BCC:

In Spring 2010, seven teams of staff and faculty worked together on the Teaching and Learning Center’s pilot of inquiry. This is the first video made of the ESL team, which focused on what students thought they needed in ESL classes to be successful in transfer-level composition class. Follow these links:  ESL Spring 2010 Inquiry Group and the Physical Science Inquiry Group.

Faculty Inquiry Network: BCC Grant

In January 2009, BCC English teachers, Scott Hoshida, Chris Lebo-Planas, and Cleavon Smith received a small grant from Chabot College’s Faculty Inquiry Network to conduct a two-year inquiry on a thorny issue in basic skills classes. After witnessing students succeed in their own classes and then fail in subsequent English classes, they wanted to know what it would take for students to move from one level to the next. They wanted to know what they could teach in one class that would stick with students as they moved through the rest of their community college experiences. The Academy for College Excellence (then called the Digital Bridge Academy) had developed a curriculum around Joseph Campbell’s idea of the hero’s journey that appears in a number of myths and tales from around the world. Starting with those ideas, each teacher developed his own personal narrative assignment to help students look critically at their own struggles, develop a narrative to make sense of it, and to start articulating goals and aspirations for their lives. In this student-edited video, students from Cleavon Smith’s basic skills English class discuss how the books this process helped their learning and contributed to their experience in his class:  Personal Narrative Writing in a Basic Skills English Class.

Other Resources: