Planning a practitioner enquiry: how do we define practitioner enquiry?
How can educators move beyond reflection to deeply understand and enhance their practice? Practitioner enquiry offers a compelling pathway.
Practitioner Enquiry, as defined by Menter et al (2011), is a 'finding out' or an investigation with a rationale and approach that can be explained or defended. Building on this, practitioner enquiry moves beyond individual reflection by ensuring findings can be shared, transforming personal insights into collective knowledge.
Therefore, practitioner enquiry can be understood as a framework or process for understanding the complexities of learning and teaching as a social practice, with the ultimate goal of enhancing our effectiveness as educators.
Practitioner enquiry is typically undertaken within your own educational setting and can be a collaborative endeavour. In collaborative enquiry, a group shares a common research focus, investigating it through different lenses to generate knowledge for sharing both within and beyond the group.
Self-evaluation and reflective practice are fundamental elements of practitioner enquiry if it is to impact practice and, ultimately, learners’ experiences. At its most effective, practitioner enquiry will be an integral aspect of your day-to-day practice.
Regular engagement in practitioner enquiry fosters professional growth by challenging or disrupting your established thinking. It helps you reconsider ingrained habits and routines, providing a crucial space to pause and re-examine existing or comfortable ways of working.
‘Enquiry as Stance’ is a term coined by Cochrane-Smith and Lytle (2009).
The term refers to enquiry as a way of being. It describes an educator who adopts a focused, critically informed, questioning approach to their professional practice and maintains that disposition continuously.
When you take an enquiring stance you should always be asking challenging questions about what you do, for example:
• For whose benefit am I enquiring?
• For what purpose(s) am I enquiring?
• What am I making ‘problematic’ and why?
• What am I not questioning? Which assumptions am I taking for granted? Why?
• What knowledge will I gain? What can be known from this enquiry?
• Who is or should be involved and why?
Another way of looking at practitioner enquiry is through the lens of ‘enquiry as project’.
In this form of enquiry, you would embark on an enquiry framed by a specific need or focus relating to practice.
Project-based enquiries are often time-bound and/or resource bound, purposely designed to investigate an aspect of practice through a method that can be defined and defended (Menter, Elliott, Hulme & Lewin, 2010).
This approach can be useful for whole-setting improvement initiatives or supporting process-focused policy enactment.
Project-based approaches are often associated with a more academic method than enquiry as stance.
One of the challenges associated with project-based approaches is that, when finished, they can give a sense of completion of professional learning. In a professional environment, you must see your learning as ongoing. You should see project-based enquiries as supplementary to maintaining a continuous enquiring stance.
