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Contrast Scotch with Brookside College, a public P-9 school in Caroline Springs west of Melbourne. According to the MySchool web page, Brookside has an enrolment of 940 – half the number at Scotch but, unlike that elite school, it draws its students from a wide range of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds with more than half from non-English speaking homes where 88% are in the lower and middle socioeconomic quartiles. Brookside has 68 teachers and 24 non-teaching staff while Scotch has 191 teachers and 106 assistants. Last year, Brookside had a net-recurrent income of $9 million  – equivalent to nearly $10,000 per student and a total capital expenditure of $137,000. In contrast, Scotch’s recurrent income was $45.5 million – equal to $24,400 per student – and its capital spending came to nearly $4 million.

The planning and the teaching are certainly deeply connected but – too often, inquiry seems almost synonymous with ‘units’.   The cringe-worthy phrase “we do inquiry” usually means: we fill in an inquiry planner using a cycle/framework of inquiry

Inquiry is not just about knowing how to plan – it’s about how we teach

1. They talk less

Does every meeting in your school relate to or result in learning?

Does every lesson in your classroom contribute to meaningful learning, rather than completion of work?

‘Have you ever had to sit through a whole hour when you felt like the substance of the meeting could have been handled in five minutes?’

1.  Give them a blog.  

2.  Give them time.

3.  Give them post-its.