Reclaiming and Composing Our Professional Lives: A Young Writing Project Learns a Language of Inquiry to Establish, Thicken, and Sustain Its Work

In coaching fellows of the Piasa Bluffs Writing Project to take up an inquiry stance toward teaching practice, we are learning the fundamental role inquiry plays in improving practice and impacting student learning. Placing inquiry at the heart of professional development, however, is challenging given the climate of high-stakes testing, which operates from a deficit-mode of thinking, a philosophy seeing students and teachers as ill-equipped or lacking. Thus a quick-fix and one-shot in-service culture has developed, complete with “experts ” offering “magic pills ” to cure the ills of teachers. This essay chronicles th