Teaching Is Inquiry

Use this framework to better understand a wide range of students, including those identified as struggling.

Many teachers maintain commitments to ideas and practices that they rarely question. Among these assumptions are ideas about children and the variety of reasons as to how they might learn or fail to learn. Teaching as inquiry is the practice of gaining distance from one’s assumptions about teaching and learning to better serve all children, including those struggling in school (K–9).

Ballenger shares stories from her experiences, demonstrating that children are always thinking and always making sense and, going further, that the ideas of our most puzzling students lead us to new recognition of what thinking looks like. Readers will learn how teaching with documentation and reflection develops and deepens their practice over time.

Divided into three sections, chapters address the framework for inquiry, language and reading groups, and the interests of particular children with special needs in relation to the curriculum. Teaching Is Inquiry details the practices of teacher inquiry with a series of sometimes sad, sometimes joyful stories from the classroom.

Book Features:

• Urges teachers to move beyond “the first look” or more superficial understandings of students.
• Demonstrates the value of documentation in order to better understand the ideas of a wide range of students, including those identified as struggling.
• Showcases the author’s powers of observation that have inspired many teachers’ inquiry into their own practice.
• Offers reflections that are both complex and open to further interpretation on the part of readers.
• Extends the author’s examination of “puzzling moments”—encounters with students that may be difficult to comprehend or do not conform to more typical interactions.

Cynthia Ballenger has been a public school teacher for 35 years and has worked with teachers and student teachers in various ways. She has written a number of books about her experiences teaching a diversity of students, including Teaching Other People's Children: Literacy and Learning in a Bilingual Classroom and Puzzling Moments, Teachable Moments: Practicing Teacher Research in Urban Classrooms.

“Wise, creative, frank, and always curious, Cindy Ballenger speaks truth about teaching. She captures the mysteries, challenges, frustrations, and joy of teaching as a deep, sustained, and lifelong inquiry.”
—Cara Furman, associate professor of early childhood education at Hunter College

"Teaching Is Inquiry is a beautiful and true book about teaching, children, and the powerful, often unorthodox and challenging ideas produced by both. It’s a cautionary and timely book: Ballenger makes the case, in rich detail, that teachers and classmates—and all of us, for democracy’s sake, as she argues—actually need the thinking of every child in the room, especially the 'puzzling,' sometimes 'difficult,' 'different,' and often marginalized ones; by her example, she also makes the case that our schools and communities likewise greatly need teachers’ good thinking. Freedom to do that thinking cannot be taken for granted but must, as she points out, be fought for."
—Dirck Roosevelt, independent scholar, Cambridge, MA

“If you are yearning for more joy, fulfillment, and understanding—in your teaching and with your students—this is the book for you. Cindy Ballenger’s ethnographic stories as a teacher researcher are brilliant and inspiring. They make you want to listen with new ears, look more closely, and document the complexities and wonders of your own classroom. If you read only one book this year, this is the one to ponder, savor, play around with, and share with colleagues!”
—Sarah Michaels, emerita professor of education, Clark University