Creando Comunidades de Indagación (Creating Communities of Inquiry)

High-quality inquiry-based learning can be transformative for students and educators alike. However, it often happens in isolated pockets: in particular classrooms or subject areas, within the practices of certain educators, or at isolated moments across the school day. How might inquiry-based teaching and learning become broadly embedded across entire networks of schools, including those that are highly centralized and have limited resources? To that end, how might greater autonomy and collaboration be fostered? What are some specific challenges for these networks and how can they be overcome? And how can individuals within these networks be supported to make necessary shifts in their mindsets about teaching and learning?

These questions, which are relevant to many schools and school systems around the world, were pursued by the Creando Comunidades de Indagación (Creating Communities of Inquiry) project—a collaborative investigation between Project Zero and the Innova Schools of Peru. Over four years, the project variously worked with teachers, school leaders, coaches, curriculum designers, and network leaders within the Innova network to explore the structures, processes, and practices that influence and promote a culture of inquiry, autonomy, and collaboration; the dispositions and shifts in mindset associated with the development of such a culture; and interventions to support them in this work. There have been various outputs of this work including an in-depth, practitioner-facing white paper called Deeper, together: Practical lessons on cultivating deeper learning from a low-cost school network. This work has also set the stage for new work that seeks to transform teaching and learning in public schools in Panama.