"There ain't no answer.  There ain't gonna be any answer.  There never has been an answer.  That's the answer."

                         -- Gertrude Stein

Inquiry as a stance ... involves making problematic the current arrangements of schooling; the ways knowledge is constructed and used; and [practitioners'] individual and collective roles in bring about change.

                         -- Lytle and Cochran-Smith, "Beyond Certainty: Taking an Inquiry Stance"

Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.

                         -- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

A scholarship of teaching is not synonymous with excellent teaching.  It requires a kind of "going meta," in which faculty frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning--the conditions under which it occurs, what it looks like, how to deepen it and so forth--and do so with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it.

                         Schulman and Hutchings, "the Scholarship of Teaching"

Resources:

• Inquiry Protocols from National School Reform Faculty
• http://actionresearch.altec.org/
• http://teachersnetwork.org/tnli/research/
• http://teacherresearch.net/
• Northern Nevada Writing Project -- Teacher Inquiry Projects
• Siobhan Curious Inquiry Blog -- Classroom as Microcosm -- Teacher reflections on classroom questions

Books:

• Living the Questions: A Guide for Teacher-Researchers (1999) Ruth Hubbard & Brenda Power
• Teacher Researchers at Work: National Writing Project (1999) Marion S. MacLean & Marian Mohr