News, press releases, and other resources from Strategic Inquiry. For media requests related to Strategic Inquiry, please contact us.
This study is an analysis of the curriculum used to teach writing at one US high school in which outcomes for students were extremely strong. The study surfaces what was different in the approach used from what is typically understood and promoted as best practice in the teaching of writing. It does so in order …
On a recent morning at Flushing HS, Demetra Fasolakis’ 10th- and 11th-grade English students — all English language learners with rudimentary English — are discussing the relationship between the poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke and a military officer, Franz Kappus, who wrote him letters asking for advice. They read aloud and annotate a paragraph …
Video interviews of teachers and district coaches being trained to lead Strategic Inquiry in NYC’s Renewal high schools.
The Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model (SAM) is a team-based school improvement and leadership development program in which participants earn graduate-level credits and school leadership certification[1]. One key component of the SAM program is peer coaching, where SAM participants, or “coaches,” partner with colleagues, or “peers,” in their schools to examine the peers’ instructional practice. In SAM, the term “peer coaching” is used …
Developing school capacity to continuously improve student achievement is essential to the success of New York City’s strategy to empower schools and hold them accountable for results. The Inquiry initiative is the New York City Department of Education (DOE’s) approach to developing this capacity. Its goal is to develop school administrators’ and teachers’ skills in …
Last week I was looking all over the house for a book called Strategic Inquiry: Starting Small for Big Results in Education by Nell Scharff Panero and Joan E. Talbert. I’ve been a fan of their work for quite a long time, and Nell gave me a call a few weeks ago to catch up and talk …
Strategic Inquiry is an innovative model for promoting teacher collaboration around identifying specific “learning gaps” that keep struggling students from succeeding. Gaps may include anything from the proper use of commas and conjunctions to concepts such as “slope” in math. The authors argue that addressing these critical learning gaps can lead to big changes in …
For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every …
