Page 22 - Agency Project

Step 2:

Establish Lines of Inquiry

2.1 What does it mean?

Once you have a field of inquiry and had it approved, it is then necessary to
narrow down what you are going to do to a set of actual testable lines of inquiry.

One way to think about this is that creating a line of inquiry could be the same
as coming up with a possible solution to a school problem and then seeing if it
(your solution) works. Another way to think about it is as proposing different
scenarios to try out to see if any of them improve the way things are done in your
school. In scientific research, this would be the same as testing a hypothesis to
guide an experiment.

2.2 Hints

Collect ideas from others. Ask others in your school and community what
they think might be valuable to do in regards to the field of inquiry that you
have chosen. Don’t just ask other teachers or school leaders, but include other
people as well. For example, if you have decided to work to improve home-
school communications, ask other teachers and parents what they think would
work. In this way, come up with creative ideas or solutions for field-testing.

Gathering background information. This is also called fact-finding,
reconnaissance or research. It is about doing your homework. During this
process of fact-finding, reflective questions can be used as the basis for guiding
the collection of information. The collection of base-line data is important
during this stage. Base-line data means evidence or information that describes
the current situation before you make changes through your actions. This base-
line data is very important for later when you are looking for evidence of changes
resulting from your Actions. For example, you may have decided that you are
interested in the issue of Performance Management. Your team then needs
to initiate fact-finding about the current state of performance management in
your school (and possibly across other ESF schools) and what people think about
it. You may also do some literature searches to find out about models of best
practices for performance management .

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