Podcast: Exploring Inquiry with Kimberly Mitchell

We’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. Where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and today we’re talking with Kimberly Mitchell about her new book, Experience Inquiry, Five Powerful Strategies, 50 Practical Experiences. Kimberly Mitchell experienced her first inquiry based lesson watching a colleague at an international

school in Keto, Ecuador. She’s been hooked by the power of inquiry ever since. After working with teachers around the world on developing great inquiry practices, she started inquiry partners in 2014 to broaden her reach. Kimberly now teaches several undergraduate courses at the University of Washington’s

College of Education where she continues to really walk the talk of inquiry. This year, Corrin published Michelle’s new book where she explores five strategies any teacher or parent can use to promote inquiry and curiosity. Let’s listen in to her conversation with Tom. Kimberly Mitchell, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast.

Thank you so much Tom. Great to be here. Where’d you go to high school? I went to a large Catholic school in Seattle called Blanchett and definitely not where I learned inquiry moves.

It’s pretty traditional and didactic. However, I would actually go back in my history. I was part of the desegregation busing plan in Seattle in the 70s. I was bussed from Ballard to Columbia City. I was part of the, remember the open concept schools in the 70s?

There was a lot of experimentation going on and I was lucky enough to be a part of that. I was in a room full of about, I want to say like maybe 120 students all open and we had four teachers and there’s some really great, looking back, great experimental work going on in there where we got to at some point choose courses we wanted to take. I mean, imagine you’re in third grade and you get to hear pitches from four different

teachers on different concepts or topics and you get to choose. I remember one of my teachers would tell stories from the opera. That was his passion. And then he would bring us to the Seattle Opera House to actually watch an opera. And, you know, at that point I was in sixth grade.

I mean, how many sixth graders care about opera, but we were just completely enthralled. So yeah, there was a lot that the impulses in the open concept were right. Yeah. Back then, I’m glad that we’re seeing so much of that in schools these days around the country. But with a little bit of infrastructure and a little bit of plan behind them, but I’m glad

you got some benefit from that. How would you, where and when would you say you found your calling to teach? You know, I really, this is a great question. I wasn’t one of those people who thought about teaching as a professional career at all until I literally passed a poster in 1991 in a hallway.

I was going to college in New York for Teach for America. And, you know, it was the second year of the program. No, nobody knew what this was. I was still a little confused, to be honest, even when I interviewed. I was a little perplexed that I would be actually the teacher of record.

I thought it was maybe like helping out in schools. And I really think the calling came when I started teaching. As soon as I started, I felt like this is home. This is where I’m meant to be. And I was hooked from the beginning.

Maybe it’s been the oldest of three girls and I was the bossy older sister. And I think I relished the role of putting things together and organizing other people in time and space. But I continued on in that role. I taught for five years and then, you know, unfortunately, like so many people, I was enticed,

persuaded, maybe it was ego to leave the classroom and go into administration, become a principal. And that was 20, what, 28 years ago. Things have come full circle for me and I’m now back in the classroom. And I know this is where I belong. So things, maybe it took me leaving the classroom to realize this is where I belong,

but I hasten to add that I’m not teaching in the K-12 system. I’m now in post-secondary, which is a totally different experience. And I think I’m enjoying it a lot more for many reasons that we can get into. But we’ll come back to that. How’d you get to Ecuador?

Oh, love. I was dating a guy who was also a teacher. And, you know, in your 20s, many of us like to keep our knees bent. And he suggested going to Quito. He had heard about these things called international schools.

And he also told me about the fact that Ecuador is a relatively safe country with mountains and the ocean and jungle. It’s spectacular. Yeah. I mean, we were both a climber.

We did mountain climbing. So we we packed up. We had a backpack and we flew down there without jobs. I still can’t believe this. Well, the next day we talk about hubris.

We just went to the international school. One of them is called Kodepoxy and Quito and knocked on the door. And we were both hired the same day. He for a job at Kodepoxy and me for a job at Colegio Americano. And that is where I learned about not only international schools and what they are,

but the international baccalaureate program specifically the pedagogy that they advocate for is called inquiry. And I had some of the best professional development of my life in Quito, Ecuador at the school. And I for me, it’s a life changing moment sitting in with other teachers

on a demo inquiry lesson. It was physics. And I just my jaw dropped. And I thought this is not how I remember being taught after elementary school. And this is definitely not how I’ve been teaching.

And it was life changing for me. And ever since then, I’ve been incredibly obsessed over how to teach in a way that gets people to lean in. When you think about that moment, what was different? What was so inspiring about it?

What was so different was that the teacher in the situation wasn’t doing the talking, but doing the question asking. That there was a lot of pauses. And it was one of the few moments where I thought I’m really thinking hard right now, instead of just being a good student and taking notes and trying to get the right answer.

So it was the teacher was asking more and talking less, which is as simple as that. How long were you in Quito? One year. And it was actually a one year internship because I was in graduate school to get my principal certificate.

So one year there, one year back in Los Angeles, which is where I taught with Teacher America. And then I came back to Seattle was an assistant principal in the Seattle Public Schools. And decided to go overseas again and became principal at the International School of Athens Grace, where I got to start the IB program for the elementary grades. It’s a program called primary years program.

How long were you in Athens? We were there for three years and had our first child there. And my husband and I both went to high school together here in Seattle. So we moved home and eventually I started working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and doing more work in policy.

And then we moved to Argentina to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I worked with Teach for All and helping social entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires set up their own local Teach for Argentina and Senya, Argentina. And now we’re back home in Seattle again. And before we leave the work in the classroom.

Well, your international experiences have certainly given you a view on the world. And I don’t want to understate how important I suspect that has been in your own formation, the way you think about inquiry. These things are related, right? Yes, yes and no, I’d say I think we I think we could be great inquires,

even if we don’t have the resources to get overseas all the time. Right. I teach right now a course called Comparative International Education. And I believe that for me, comparing things, getting out of your own world and seeing how there are other ways to live in the world is really important to do.

And I’m I was struck by a talk I heard where and I can’t I’m sorry, I can’t remember the name of this this teacher who said it is important to get out and see how other people live in the world. And you don’t always have to get on an airplane. Sometimes you can just drive down the I-5 corridor or the highway and see a community

that is so vastly different from your own. So I guess especially thinking about climate and our responsibility to the planet. I do I think travel in airplanes and cars, long distances is a great luxury and a really important thing to do.

But I want to I want to push ourselves to think about how we can see things differently in our own communities as well. Thanks, we certainly appreciate that sentiment. I do want to just give a plug to international educators. It’s such a wonderfully interesting eclectic group and it’s an interesting mixture of people

that like you thought it would be a year or two and and then others that have turned it into a life into a career. But they’re they’re an interesting adventure seeking a group of folks often full of inquiry and curiosity. I agree.

You know, if I were to do it all over again, I would have maybe learned about them much earlier in my career. Like you, I have friends who have raised their families overseas and every few years they go to a new country. I think it’s it’s a it’s a great secret.

I don’t think people enough people enough teachers know about the opportunities that international schools afford. And I would also say it’s they are typically private schools. So you are teaching, you know, sort of the elite from these countries as well as expats. And it was strange for me to go from Teach for America teaching children who were, you know,

immigrants and refugees and high poverty communities to go to these international schools with the elite students. And I I had a hard time at first reconciling this until someone said, you know, Kimberly, these children will run their countries in some form or another. And it’s imperative that they have the dispositions, mindsets, beliefs, skills to make the world

a better place. And that that a switch might guilt a little bit. But, you know, every child is worthy and has needs. And so I would say international schools are a great, great opportunity for for teachers out there in the United States.

So Kimberly, you’re back in Seattle. You you run a company focused on inquiry based learning called inquiry partners. You incorporate inquiry into the the courses that you teach at the University of Washington. Why has that become such a focal point for you?

Well, inquiry has, I believe, is one of the most effective ways to teach and to help students learn. I feel like helping students, adults, ask great questions and be compassionate problem solvers is that is the vision for my work. And teaching at the University allows me to not only teach certain content areas,

but to help me develop my skills as an inquiry teacher. So I’m constant. I’m still learning how to do it well. I have unique challenges in the undergraduate classrooms, specifically at this large university.

I have typically anywhere from 60 to 90 students in my courses. We meet twice a week for two and a half hours each time. And the other unique feature, unfortunately, is that I’m in classrooms with fixed chairs that are faced forward and that fill the room. So that’s ironic.

Right. Ridiculous. The messages we’re sending with this, I do try and request there are now on campus rooms called active learning classrooms, which just wonder shouldn’t they all be active learning.

But so I get very serious about practicing what I preach. And I do a couple things to extend my inquiry practice. First of all, after setting a lot of norms and getting to know each other and building community and trust, I ask the students to start leading the classroom so that they have practice in lesson planning and delivering and asking good questions and facilitating

one another and then reflecting on work. I like to incorporate a lot of structures from an organization called liberating structures, which is just a way for usually adults to come together and have deeper conversations and do more critical thinking. One of my favorites is called impromptu networking.

And it’s basically getting all the students to stand up, find a partner, someone they haven’t talked to, and have a conversation based on a prompt and then move around the room. Very simple, very simple, but very powerful structure. I assign readings and then I take a lot of time thinking about giving them opportunities to generate something new from the readings rather than just summarizing or even just

analyzing a reading. And that might be respond to the author in a letter to the editor or prioritize the importance of or the order in which this author can solve a problem, give advice, work in teams. So I’m constantly looking for new ways to extend my own inquiry practice. So you’ve published, recently published a great new book called experience inquiry.

It includes five powerful strategies. I’d love to take a quick spin through the outline of the book. I like this book because it’s both a toolbox of tips and tricks, but it’s also it’s really the basis of a pedagogy. And you do a nice job of including both the big ideas and lots of useful tips and tricks as we go through.

It starts with number one, get personal. It’s about making a connection. Why do you stay there? Because I find that’s the foundation of any teaching and learning, positive teaching and learning environment is forming emotional bonds with students and getting students to form emotional

bonds with one another, which I think is the leap that we need to do, especially as we get into secondary school environments. We need to have students start turning their heads and realizing that they’re in a physical space with other human beings in a place and a time together and making the best use of that. So yeah, that is, that’s the, I guess that’s why it is number one is

that creating that emotional bond and getting personal with students and letting them know that you’re also learning, which leads right into the second strategy, which is get curious. If we go into a classroom or a learning situation, as though we know everything and there’s nothing more to be explored, how do we expect our students to get excited and curious themselves about this work rather than I know something and it’s time for you to learn what I know?

I really, I have to challenge myself to constantly look for, even though I’ve read Macbeth, 25 times and taught it as many years, you have to think about what is still unique about this? What are the unanswered questions? What do we not know and how do I communicate that to my students? Are, do you have a couple tips that, that you use personally on to stay curious? Do, is there anything about your weekly habits that, that feeds your curiosity?

So I’d say more than anything else, these first two strategies get personal and stay curious is they’re dispositional things. So how do you communicate these dispositions? Forget curious, when students respond in the classroom to me, I really try to hold back judgment. So instead of saying great or excellent, I’ll say thank you. I’ll also avert my eyes so that they learn to start talking to each other instead of just to me. So I often tell them like, we’re

not playing tennis with a teacher where the ball goes back to me and then back to you, but it’s more like soccer. Can you pass the ball around the room? I also let them know what I don’t know and what I’m still really curious about. Recently, in one of my courses, a student said, you know, it looks like in Singapore, they’re teaching in a very rote fashion and they’re still doing well on a piece exam, which is supposed to measure creativity and critical

thinking skills. What’s up with that? And you know, I said, I don’t know where, first of all, where did this come? Where did you get this information? What does rote mean? But instead of being feeling like I’m the answer key, and this comes from a guy named Dan Finkel, who has a brilliant TED talk about this. I am not the answer key. I’m the guide and I’m learning along with you. And yes, my understanding and knowledge is deeper, but I’m here to serve you and I’m also

here to model what learning looks like. Yeah, Kimberly had a post in a blog last week called the new school formula, harder questions and fewer answers. Love it. And right. And I think we need more of that, but it does, as you suggest, this is a new disposition that allows us or that requires us to be intellectually humble as adults to say, you know what, we’re in this with you, we’re willing to explore a big question that we’re not sure of the answer. And that’s a new

disposition for us as educators. I really like what you just said, intellectual humility, I think is the perfect way of describing this strategy. Number three, ask one or talk less. Yeah, well, this is the quintessential thing that you hear when someone says I’m an inquiry based teacher. Easier said than done. I there’s a book that was written in 1969, you may have heard of it teaching as a subversive activity. And the authors argue way back then that, you know,

teachers should limit their declarative sentences and increase the questions and interrogatives. And then there’s another book that came along called teaching with your mouth shut, which is written by an evergreen state professor in the I think it was the 90s. And it’s can we can we resist that default position of thinking that teaching is telling? Can we allow silence and leadership to fill the room? Because I love the phrase, whoever’s doing

the thinking is usually or whoever’s doing the talking is usually doing the thinking. You know, people can argue that one, but it’s true. Like right now, having this discussion with you, I’m doing a lot of cognitive lifting. And so I’m I’m always mindful of how much talking I’m doing in the classroom. The beginning of a quarter, I do a lot more talking than I do at the end, because I’m setting systems up for my students to be the ones to taking that to take

that leadership role. And this strategy is called ask, ask more talk less. But I if I could extend it and it still make it a piffy title, it would be about students asking questions. Because the other thing that I noticed is that once they get to, you know, college students aren’t asking any questions except logistical ones like what size font do you want on this paper? Yeah, no, this is this is one of the things that I appreciate about Minerva, which is a new

university program within the core pedagogy is really Socratic seminar where it isn’t entirely about asking good questions of each other. Kimberly, you also you’ve explored in the last five years strategies for helping teachers become more metacognitive of the amount of questioning they do the balance between questioning and telling and that you think coaching and maybe even ed tech is going to help us get more aware of how well we’re doing on this front, right?

Yeah, thanks for remembering that. Yeah, I was experimenting with how can teachers remind themselves of their talk time. But also as you say, the questions they ask. And my partner and I developed an app called earshot where it records the teacher’s voice and essentially gives them that information talk time, wait time, how many seconds go by between asking a question and soliciting an answer. And then also the questions what questions are being asked by the teacher and then how do those

questions fit into a taxonomy. And I think what was really challenging and I love how getting smart you talk about the importance of working together. So anyone listening to this right now, I hope maybe you could be share some of your thoughts and ideas on this because we’re really struggling with how to categorize questions, you know, there’s there’s divergent and convergent so open and closed, which is great to know. But I think what we found is that it’s good to have a mix.

And then you could put it maybe you could put questions into a taxonomy. Bloom’s taxonomy is actually he’s pretty clear that that’s not what his taxonomy is for. Web’s depth of knowledge, you could try and do that, but it’s really, really hard to do. So you know, the short answer is we’re stuck. And we’re still trying to figure out ways to utilize technology to coach teachers to make some of these moves. And we haven’t figured it out yet. Great questions. Number four is explored

evidence. So here we’re asking, we’re asking learners, how do you know that to sort of probe their own learning and the evidence behind it, right? Exactly. So, you know, in any inquiry based classroom where students are doing a lot of questioning and problem solving and critical thinking, especially now with some of the sum of all human knowledge is on a cell phone, we need to start helping our our students be really rigorous about where they get their information. And I

would say a lot of times we have there’s some great resources. And you have published a lot about how we get really smart with media literacy and digital literacy. I think we forget oftentimes that this should start when when our children are in preschool by asking how you know that. And the typical response will be because my mommy told me or I experienced it, I saw it. And I think we need to really see that as an important, important move. So Kimberly, think think about

this factoid, the 2020 election is going to be the first one that will be overrun by synthetic video the first time in human history when you’ve been able to make up a video and show your opponent saying something that’s completely outrageously false. Yeah, right. And we’re likely to have a good deal of that in this in this election. So this is a whole new wave of digital literacy, where we’re going to have to ask young people to be really thoughtful and careful about

how do you know that? Where did you find that? Or how can we check to check the accuracy and the source of that? Yeah, so this is super, super important. Yes, I don’t know if you have places that you go for really good tools on this. But I mean, I’m, I’m 50 years old. So I feel like I am learning every day about how how to get smarter on checking the veracity of information. But right now I go to common sense media. And I go to there’s a woman a researcher Renee Hobbs,

I think it’s the digital media toolkit or something like that. There’s some great resources out there for teachers to to help their students understand this. So I want to move to number five. This is kind of my favorite topic, extended thinking time. What we’ve talked about are how to engage kids in good questions. But we also need to create time and space for inquiry. So this one works on a couple different levels. It’s not only just about wait time when we ask a good question.

It’s also about making space in our busy schedules to invite students into extended challenges. Yeah, extended thinking time. What what’s included here? Well, you’re starting with, you know, sort of the obvious one. And I think it’s easier to implement, given the constraints of a school day. And that is wait time. And one thing that I’ve always admired about you, Tom, is that you are in conversation, you, you do pause. And I think that

needs to be rewarded more in classrooms. I also think that when students are in articulate, you know, don’t have a fully formed thought, we need to praise that and give some more space for that. So that’s what’s one, what’s one thing I think we all need to be more aware of. I did hear a statistic that, you know, the optimal wait time, according to research is three to five seconds, which doesn’t seem like a long time. But the average wait time for teachers in the

United States is actually 0.7. So we still, I think, have a long way to go with that. And we still value the fast thinkers. As far as extending time so that students can do more project based learning, deeper learning, given the constraints of the school day, something needs to give, it’s got to be a trade off, right? So I think this is going to be a community conversation. I think parents need to be in on this too. If we value deeper learning, we’ve got to allow the

space in the school day to do that. And I would say also just the profession needs to change. I’ve learned a lot recently about how the, the job description and the time that’s allocated for teachers in other parts of the world for collaboration and their own thinking and lesson planning and assessment. We need to give teachers a lot more of that time. Right now, I feel like in the U.S., the pace is frenetic and doesn’t lend itself to really good learning. And it’s burning

people out, teachers and students. Yeah, we couldn’t agree more. I want, I just want to make a note here and have you comment on it. Many people think about project based learning as really a multi-step effort towards a defined goal. But there are many different kinds of projects, some of which are quite open-ended that really are rich in terms of inquiry and creativity. That’s why we’re happy to see more design challenges, more maker opportunities that are

a bit more open-ended and invite iteration so that the final product may be quite different than what we had initially envisioned. And so we tend to think that a mixture of sort of well-defined products and more open-ended activities is a nice mixture to promote inquiry. Does that sound right? I totally agree. Yes, totally agree. And I think maybe it comes down to when we set these up, it’s looking at our ultimate objectives. I mean, if the ultimate

objective is super, like, what am I trying to say? It’s just this is the product you will create. That sets it up for one direction. But what if the objective is we want to see students taking risks or we want to see them collaborating in new ways or I want to see this student initiating and not giving up or I want to see it’s more of the so-called soft skills objectives? I think those are just important. And I believe that a river needs banks to flow. So I don’t think,

a lot of people think inquiries like, let’s just let them learn whatever they want in their own timeframe. I mean, I think this is kind of that’s foolish as well. I think the objectives need to be really clear. And I think we need to get over the fact that students come to a specific product on everything they do in school. I think we need to look more deeply at non-cognitive and sort of 21st century skill development as objectives. Kimberly, I’d love to see every

high school student have time to get to know the UN sustainable development goals. I think of those as a part of the earth owners manual, the thing that young people ought to know about the world they’re inheriting and have time to go deep on a couple of those and look for a way that they can make a contribution. How and where do we make time for those kinds of large scale inquiries in a as you described it, the frenetic secondary pace? Well, I think many teachers get overwhelmed and

they think they need to carve out huge chunks of time. And certainly if you’re in a school that values that and project based learning, it’s very exciting that you have this time. But I would take the pressure off teachers and say, start slow, go to the wonderment, which is an online resource where kids can connect with other kids around the world and solve big problems together and give students maybe 30 minutes and start there and see how it goes and communicate with your parents and get

feedback from students on how this is working. Yeah, PBL, project based learning, doesn’t have to be this big humongous thing. I would just say, start with baby steps. I did my own, you and I were talking earlier about the importance of place based learning. And in my class, I try and do that as well because I want my kids to get out of these fixed chairs. And I have them go shadow teachers. And to do that, they need to learn how to make a cold call to a teacher that, you know, form an

email that will get answered. They need to learn how to get transported to a school and find the door and greet the administrative person there and put on a name tag and find it. I mean, all the skills that are involved with getting out and having an experience outside of class, I think is really important. In one of my courses where the topic is adult learning and development, I have my students go to the Apple store and watch, just sit in and watch a session, see how adults are trying to

figure out technology. So I think, I think I’m really excited not only about how you can incorporate something as important as UN sustainability goals, which you can do in every class, I would argue, but also how you get people to see their own environment around them as the greatest learning environment there is. Yeah, we can find big blocks in the time in our busy schedules, but it often requires several teachers to work together and do a combined unit. And that all comes back to the

planning time to pull this off. So I appreciate your mentioning that. We do want to underscore the power of place. We just finished a book for ASCD that will come out early next year. We think place is the perfect context for inquiry. And it’s wonderful if it can include the kind of international travel that you’ve had a chance to do, Kimberly, but it also can start with opening your classroom door and asking kids to observe what they see. Right? Place is powerful, local and

global. Couldn’t agree more. You mentioned just walking around the school building. Everyone, luckily, were all situated in a place. And every place has something to teach. Yes, yes. I’ve even, I learned this from a friend. I often do just to get my students up and moving, have initiated walk and talks, and it’s a five minute go out. Well, here’s the prompt again. A river needs banks to flow. I’m pretty prescriptive about that. How do we hold students accountable

to having those talks? How do we get them outside breathing fresh air and looking ahead and talking to someone new? I think these are the things that I’m really trying to prioritize in my classroom. Kimberly Mitchell, it’s been a treat to have you on the podcast. Your book is Experiencing Inquiry, Five Powerful Strategies, 50 Practical Experiences. Where can people learn more? Well, Experiencing Inquiry is on Amazon. So you can go there or you can check out my website,

which is inquirypartners.com. And yeah, we also do Twitter chats and occasionally we’ll do webinars. And I’m, if anyone’s in the Seattle area. On Twitter, it’s inquiry five. Inquiry five, and that’s the word five, not the number five. And if anyone’s in the Seattle area, I welcome them to come visit my classroom and see how I am able to teach in an inquiry based way in a post-secondary environment. Great stuff. Kimberly, thanks for being on the podcast.

Always great to talk with you, Tom. Thank you so much for your support over the years. A big thanks to Kimberly Mitchell for talking with us for today’s episode. If you’re interested in learning more about her book, Experience Inquiry, Five Powerful Strategies, 50 Practical Experiences, we’ve included a link in the show notes and on the blog. And for more on reinventing teacher preparation, make sure you check out episode 188 with Jim Tracy of Woodrow Wilson Academy of

Teaching and Learning. Don’t worry about grabbing a pen, we have that all linked in the show notes as well as on the blog. And to continue learning about all things innovations and learning, head on over to GettingSmartt.com for today’s podcast blog, as well as thousands of others that explore the future of learning and work. That’s it for today, listeners. Thank you for tuning in to the podcast. For the Getting Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.