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This chapter presents a description of a pilot course for 12th-grade students in research methods and writing, using Guided Inquiry Design to develop students’ critical literacy and information literacy skills.

Using a practitioner inquiry methodology, this teacher research study makes use of qualitative data to examine student perspectives and experiences, teaching artifacts and student work samples. The research seeks to identify ways students practice critical literacies when engaged with inquiry learning, as well as the characteristics of a classroom learning community designed to support students’ experiences in inquiry learning.

Teachers of research-based writing are encouraged to adopt a guided inquiry approach to their instruction in which they flip the script on the thesis statement, allow for an almost uncomfortable amount of exploratory reading, put the focus on the process instead of the product, and form a guided inquiry team with the school librarian.

This chapter serves as a resource for practicing teachers, teacher researchers, and teacher educators assisting new teachers in embedding critical inquiry skill development in student writing.

This study examined educators’ self-perception as practitioners of inquiry-based math and science instruction, their motivation to produce videos to share that practice, and the impact of video production on their use of inquiry and role in the professional development community. Semi-structured interviews were used to address the research questions. Participant responses indicated a high level of self-reflection and a keen understanding of the nature of inquiry-based math and science teaching. Participants were motivated to share their practice largely by their desire to help other educators develop as inquiry practitioners. Articulating how and why they used inquiry-based techniques for the videos deepened their already reflective teaching. The positive aspects of participation also increased their confidence in their ability to engage in professional development as teacher-leaders. Overall this study indicated that videos created for the purposes of professional development had a transforming effect on those who produced them in addition to their benefit for others.

Many K-12 teachers teach difficult topics as part of their curricula, and discussions of difficult topics are common across grade levels and content areas. As teachers increasingly engage with difficult topics in their classrooms, the need for high-quality professional learning experiences has also grown. In response, the purpose of this article is to introduce an emerging partnership between the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State and the Red Lion Area School District (Red Lion, Pennsylvania), conceptualized from the outset with an explicit focus on intentionally engaging in collaborative, inquiry-based professional learning surrounding difficult topics in formalized curricula and within educational practice.

The article briefly describes how the partners came together, then provides a high-level overview of how they approached their first year of collaboration. Next, the partners’ adaptation of inquiry-based professional learning is outlined. The article concludes by discussing lessons learned from the first year of partnering and implications for scholarship in the areas of school-university partnerships, inquiry-based professional learning, and difficult topics.

The article observes that it took educators participating in a difficult-topics inquiry community an entire year to begin shifting ownership of inquiry to K-12 students. It illustrates how school-university partnerships can be used to support difficult-topics inquiry and raises new questions about the role of difficult topics in partnership work.

The article contributes an original example to the literature that demonstrates how inquiry-based professional learning focused on difficult topics can provide a powerful basis for forming a school-university partnership.

Studies in teacher research have seldom discussed the effects of writing publications and teachers’ views on it. This paper aims to examine how teachers in China regard the purpose of writing up research papers and its impact on their professional practice. It also investigates facilitating factors in preparing and writing publications.

This is a qualitative study which mainly analyses interview data gathered from 14 teachers, who have experience in writing publications, from three schools in Shanghai, China. Documentary analysis includes selected published journal papers and book chapters of the interviewees.

Findings show that teachers perceive producing publications as serving both an instrumental purpose of career advancement and a developmental purpose of enhancing their individual professional competency which in turn improves the quality of the teaching profession through knowledge transfer and knowledge transportation.

Contributing factors to help teachers to write include the provision of systematic training courses for teachers and the development of network and research partners.

Findings of this study help school leaders and teacher educators better their understanding of improving the quality of practice of teachers through equipping them with a “stance of inquiry”. Findings suggest ways to provide relevant support to enhance the writing capacity of teachers. More importantly, a revision of the existing teacher promotion system may make the practice of writing publications of more direct value to teachers’ daily practice.

The world is facing unprecedented potential disaster with the impending climate crisis. Research within social studies education surrounding the integration of ecological issues, while still on the fringes, has seen a recent surge. This is a review of practitioner-oriented research published in the last ten years on teaching these issues in social studies classes.

This study reviews practitioner-oriented articles on teaching ecological issues in social studies classes. The author searched databases and did a manual review using specific search terms. The author’s first level of analysis was to analyze the year of publication, whether the article was (co) written by a practicing teacher and whether the article featured a lesson plan/resources. The author then analyzed the content/focus of each article.

In total, ten articles were (co)written by a practicing teacher, 23 articles included lesson plans and the article themes could fall into one of six themes (water issues, pollution, climate change, climate activism, sustainability and economic growth and ecological citizenship/ethics).

The author was unable to review one year of articles from the Ohio Social Studies Review due to the COVID-19 pandemic and only having remote institutional access to library materials.

In reviewing the practitioner-oriented articles, the author hopes to not only strengthen the curricular justifications for teaching these issues in social studies classes but also show what research has been done and provide critiques and show what could be done in the future.

Appreciative inquiry is built upon recognition of the profound power of questions in shaping our worlds; a power invoked by the phrase, “questions are fateful.” We wonder, “What kinds of questions can optimize our inquiry and contribute to catalyzing transformational change?” The goal of this chapter is to provide conceptual and practical answers to this question. We seek to enrich and contribute to the field of appreciative inquiry through expanded ways of thinking about inquiry and the generation of questions. We begin by considering how questions influence how we think, behave, and relate. How do questions affect outcomes? We examine the nature of thinking as intrinsically a question and answer process and highlight the vital role of “QuestionThinking™” for creating new possibilities. We present the Learner-Judger Mindset Model, which provides distinctions for strengthening the spirit of inquiry in constructing questions. Then we examine how appreciative inquiry practitioners can take advantage of the distinctions and practices of QuestionThinking using the Mindset Model. Finally, we provide practical question-centered practices that can lead to positive new futures for ourselves and the individuals and organizations we serve.

Practitioner research is now widely used in different programs of teacher preparation. It is expected that teachers conducting research on their own work will become more reflective and develop the skills required to become life-long learners. Even though many programs for teacher preparation include some form of teacher research it is not common to find tools to assess teachers and to allow for peer- and self-assessment. In this chapter, we present a pedagogy that uses heuristic diagrams as a mean to assess teachers’ research. We have used such heuristics with teachers participating in a Research Methods Course in a Master Degree and have found that it allows teachers to engage in a constant interplay between the theoretical and the practical and encourages the development of better research questions. Teachers have systematically found this tool very useful in advancing their research projects in the different scenarios where teachers are trying to improve their practice through research.

Organizational development and change may be initiated from two different starting points. A diagnostic approach begins with an examination of problems to assess and correct dysfunction. In contrast, the Appreciative Inquiry approach begins by identifying an organization’s strengths as resources for change. An experimental study was conducted to compare the processes and outcomes that arise during the first phase of each approach. Results show that both approaches lead to different but favorable and complementary outcomes. Both participant gender and the gender construction of the dyads in which individuals participated moderate these effects in unexpected ways. The implications for understanding the processes by which both methods work, and the potential for combining them, are discussed

In Hawaiʻi, two public library systems exist – a traditional municipal branch system and a Native Hawaiian rural community-based library network. The Hawaii State Public Library System (HSPLS) is the traditional municipal library system that services the state’s diverse communities with 51 branch locations, plus its federal repository, the Hawaii State Library for the Blind and Print Disabled. The HSPLS primarily serves the local urban communities of Hawaiʻi, diverse in its citizenry. The Native Hawaiian Library, a unit of ALU LIKE, Inc. (a Hawaiian non-profit social services organization), boasts multiple locations across six inhabited Hawaiian Islands, primarily serving rural Hawaiian communities. The HSPLS focuses on traditional public library services offered by MLS-degreed librarians. In contrast, the Native Hawaiian Library (ALU LIKE) focuses on culturally oriented literacy services offered by Hawaiian cultural practitioners. As the state’s only library and information sciences (LISs) educational venue, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s LIS program (UHM LIS) is a nexus point between these two library systems where LIS students learn the value of community-based library services while gaining the traditional technical skills of librarianship concerning Hawaiʻi as a place of learning and praxis.

This book chapter focuses on outcomes from the IMLS-funded research project called “Hui ʻEkolu,” which means “three groups” in the Hawaiian language. From 2018 to 2021, the HSPLS, the Native Hawaiian Library (ALU LIKE), and the UHM LIS Program gathered as “Hui ʻEkolu” to create a community of praxis to share and exchange knowledge to learn from one another to improve professional practice and heighten cultural competency within a Hawaiian context. Native Hawaiian values were leveraged as a nexus point for the three groups to connect and build relationships for sustainable mentorship and culturally competent connections as a model for librarian professional development. The result is a model for collective praxis that leverages local and endemic cultural values for sustainable collaborative professional development for public librarianship.