Inquiry Questioning Routines with Trevor MacKenzie, ep. 249

Inquiry Questioning Routines with Trevor MacKenzie, ep. 249, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

Hey, Coach, if you’ve been waiting for the confident literacy coach course to open up, your wait is almost over. The course is opening soon, and I want you to be the first to know make sure you’ve signed up at confident literacy coach.com to be included on the wait list. You’ll be notified as soon as it opens for enrollment. This year is going to be even better than before. I’ve updated the reading and writing modules to provide you with the knowledge. You need to support your school in implementing practices that are proven to build skilled readers and writers. Get the PD. You need to provide the PD and learning. They need join the wait list so you can join the course.

Chrissy Beltran  00:37

Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Chrissie Beltran, an elementary teacher who became a coach, and I had to create my own coaching program that worked. Now I teach coaches how to design their coaching programs, build a school wide action plan and use differentiated strategies to support teachers. Plus, I’ve got a special spot in my heart for literacy coaches. Now let’s dig into the episode.

Chrissy Beltran  01:03

Hey coach, and welcome to episode 249, of instructional coaching with Miss B today, we are talking about questioning routines for inquiry with Trevor McKenzie. This is part of my series on instruction and lesson plan creation, and I just find it really interesting to talk with some really great educators about what makes really good instruction. So we’re going to dig into inquiry today with something that’s very accessible that anyone can use in their classroom with questioning routines. Before we get started, I want to share with you to remind you I have my defining your role as a literacy coach, free webinar that you can grab and you get it for. I mean, this goes right into your inbox if you go to buzzing with Miss b.com/episode 249, and scroll down, you will see a place to grab that webinar at the bottom. And it’s really helpful to walk you through all the steps that you need to define your role and share it with the people that are the most important for you to share it with. So you can grab that for free. And of course, my course, the confident literacy coach, is opening soon. I want you to be on that wait list. So go to confident literacy coach.com and sign up, and that way you get a little coupon to use whenever the course opens very soon. So without further ado, we’re going to dig into our topic of questioning routines today. This is something that anybody can use in any kind of content area, in reading, writing, social, anything. And I think that those kinds of strategies are so important for us to have because they will help us work with of all teachers, regardless of who we are working with. So let’s welcome my guest today to talk about this. Thank you so much for joining us today, Trevor, and it’s a quick way to introduce yourself. I’d love to hear about a few things.

Trevor MacKenzie  02:40

Thank you. Yeah. Hi, Christy. Hi everyone listening and watching. So I’m Trevor McKenzie. I teach high school English here in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. I teach from an inquiry stance. You know, I have certain values that shape the time that I have with students that I support, and those values of inquiry I write about. I visit schools around the world at four publications in the field of inquiry, and so I’m very blessed to do both, you know, teach students and also teach teachers. So as an instructional coach, I’m very much engaged in, yeah, helping schools shift their practices so they’re more student centered and inquiry centered, if you will. Chrissy, awesome. Thank you so much.

Chrissy Beltran  03:15

Yeah, that’s how I found you online. You were sharing on Instagram about your inquiry work, and I just think it’s so interesting, and I’m excited to share it with people today. Excited to share it with people today. Thank you. Thank you. So I do have a question that I’m asking everybody this season, and it’s because I feel like so many of us dedicate so much of our work to school and so much of our lives to school, that we don’t always have hobbies outside of school. So I am curious about a hobby that you really enjoy. Yeah.

Trevor MacKenzie  03:41

Oh, I love being outside. So, you know, I it’s not like anything outside I’m up for but hiking, walking my dog, riding a bike. We live in a beautiful, beautiful city, Ocean and mountains, and I often say the best part of travel is coming home, just so I can get outside, in nature. So anything outside, anything with my family. I have a 17 year old, or, excuse me, a 15 year old and a 12 year old, and so anything that keeps me busy with them is is a joyful experience too. So yeah, that’s a little bit about me. This is nice. We could know each other a little bit. So thanks for

Chrissy Beltran  04:11

Yes. Chrissy, of course. Yeah, I I’ve been interested in hearing about hobbies because I do feel like we don’t spend enough time filling us our own joy up outside of school, and then we go to school and kind of a running on empty, and so, so, yeah, I’ve been trying to get hear what people do, and I love to I like to spend a lot of time outside, too. I like to garden in the backyard when, you know, weather permitting. I like to bike ride with the kids. They’re still little, so that’s the whole safety thing. But I do enjoy it.

Speaker 2  04:40

Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Chrissy, thanks for that. Appreciate it.

Chrissy Beltran  04:43

Yeah. So okay, we’re the work that I’m really interested in today is questioning routines, because I feel like this is like a really good first step people can take into inquiry if they are uncertain, if they’re unsure of how to get started, a questioning routine can be a game changer for so many classrooms. So can you. Introduce us to what a question routine is, and talk a little bit about how it can change your instruction.

Trevor MacKenzie  05:05

Yeah, yeah. You know, at the heart of inquiry is curiosity. We want our students curious about their learning and about the curriculum and about what we’re teaching, and so a byproduct of curiosity should be student generated questions. You know, if we are engaging in relevant, meaningful learning. Kids should have questions. Question routines allow us to and allow our students to sort and organize their questions in a variety of ways, meaningful ways, helpful ways, where their questions are quite visible in the classroom, once they’re sorted, where we can together begin to sort and organize their questions. So quite literally, have their questions guide our next steps through the curriculum. So there are 10 question routines. These are very, I don’t want to say simple, because they’re certainly not simplistic, but they really are simply implemented. They’re visible. They’re, you know, easily sorted and organized. You know, one question routine is aptly called the question triangle. If we can imagine a inverted triangle for a moment, everyone at the top of the inverted triangle, we’re going to label it closed ended questions. The middle area of the triangle, the middle band, we’re going to label it more open questions. And then the bottom pointy end, we’re going to say most open questions. And so part of the work with question routines is having students understand what those phrases mean, closed and open questions. And so these conversations that we have with students, in part, we call it co designing indicators for closed and open so, you know, Christie, if I were to ask you a few things that come along in your mind, do you mind playing along when I say closed ended questions. What comes to mind for you?

Chrissy Beltran  06:42

I think of something with one answer, with like, almost like a fill in the blank, good. Give me a couple more. Yes or No, true or false, beautiful.

Trevor MacKenzie  06:51

So that conversation is what we need to have with students. The whole class turn and talk. They share some ideas, and we write those on an anchor chart. So now we’ve got an anchor chart of clothes indicators. Then we’ll do the same thing for open. And now students can look at those indicators with their questions on sticky notes, and sort their questions into the triangle. So now we can go places with regards to research, with regards to exploring their questions. The clothes lead to the open right, like we can’t have a deep understanding, unless we have some, you know, surface area knowledge of a topic or a concept or an issue. And we certainly can’t just explore the close ended stuff that would be like, pretty boring and pretty quick, right? We need to have the open to give relevance to the close. So that’s one example. And gosh, how long did I spend on that one? Like three minutes, right? Chrissy, there are 10 high impact question routines that allow us to begin to co design learning with our students questions. Does that all make sense? Everything I threw to you?

Chrissy Beltran  07:47

Chrissy, yes, yes. And I look forward to asking you about a few more of those questioning routines, if you can describe some in detail for us. But before we do, I want to think ask a little bit more about sorting. You talked about sorting student questions. And so in this questioning routine, you’re sorting based on closed and like, the degree of closed and open question. What are some other ways that you might sort student questions?

Trevor MacKenzie  08:08

Yeah, so just to be clear, number one, I I’m not doing the sorting. We aren’t doing sorting. We’re inviting them up to this routine that’s physically posted, maybe on a whiteboard or an anchor chart, and they’re doing the sorting, and we’re doing the watching and the listening and the coaching. So that’s one sorting the close and open. Another one’s called the question staircase. And they actually sort their questions to Bloom’s taxonomy. So they look at blooms and and we talk about all the different layers of blooms, and they have to sort to those different levels of thinking, which is really quite, you know, metacognitive when they think about the purpose and intention of their questions. And of course, what do teachers want? We want them to get to, you know that the beautiful depth of blooms, right? We just don’t want them sitting in the superficial we want them to go into that analysis and that synthesis space. So Bloom’s Taxonomy is one that we’ve adopted as a question routine. Another one’s called the question pencil. And the question pencil, of course, is this long, linear, horizontal shape as a pencil, but it’s chopped up into different types of questions. And when I say different types, I’m not talking about close and open. I’m talking about question stems. So what questions? Why questions? How questions? There are about nine or 10 different questions stems that students are sorting their questions towards again to allow us to use them to guide some next steps. So those are three different ways that we sort questions. There are a variety of others, 10 high impact question routines, again, each one serves a little bit different of a purpose, from close to open blooms. And in this case, question stems.

Chrissy Beltran  09:39

Chrissy, so how do you go about provoking kids or generating questions, getting them to think beyond you know what? They’re just the information that we’re receiving, and really develop that

Trevor MacKenzie  09:51

curiosity? Yeah, well, you said it. You said provoke. So in the inquiry classroom and in the inquiry repertoire, a move we make is called provocation. And. Provocation is a planned experience where the intended outcome is to get our students curious about our curricular objectives. So teachers who are really well versed in provocation look at their curriculum, look at what we have to teach and design an experience. It could be as little as 30 seconds. It could be as an expansive as a field trip, taking kids out of class to explore nature or a local space that is relevant. And as we’re doing so, as they’re engaging in this provocation, we’re calling on students to notice what they see, notice any key ideas that come up in their viewing or they’re experiencing this provocation. You know what powerful language is bubbling up for them? IE, what critical language or words or vocabulary. Do we need to have them know? But we don’t need to pre teach that through the provocation it might come from them and their connections are accessing prior knowledge. Another piece of provocation is we want students to stop and jot questions that they’re wondering about. You know, what are you curious about? So if the teachers plan provocation to the curriculum, then their question should be about the curriculum, not about, you know, Fortnite or unicorns or those are fantastic subjects and topics and things. But we want them asking questions about the things that they have to learn about, that we want them to get curious about. So provocation is the tool. Chrissy, there’s a whole chapter on provocation to walk teachers through how we can design provocation. It’s a critical step so teachers listening and watching. If this is new to you, the question routines have to come after planning for provocation, if you will.

Chrissy Beltran  11:32

Mm, hmm. Okay, so that you got it, you mentioned something that I think is really important about how we are using this to develop kids, you know, thinking through the curriculum, right? And so many teachers, I feel like they find this overwhelming, because to them, they don’t know they’re like, they’re they say, Where does it go? How does it fit? So if you’re thinking about unit planning, for example, if you’re planning a unit, where are you using questioning routines throughout that unit to support kids understanding and further learning of the curriculum. Because I, I feel like teachers feel like this. They lose a little bit of the control here because kids ask questions that maybe they don’t have an answer to, or maybe they don’t that wasn’t what we were going to work on tomorrow. So so like, how does that fit in?

Trevor MacKenzie  12:18

A couple of things surface for in my thinking and in your prompting, there Christine number one a provocation, or series of provocation, you know, like a picture carousel or several provocations stacked up upon one another at the start of a unit is really important. It’s a diagnostic. What do your kids know? And what do they not know yet? And what do they want to know? So those are three questions we we kind of cycle back to across a unit. What do they know? What do they not know, and what do they want to know? So we need to do that at the start of the unit number one. But by no means do we have to answer all student questions. You know, after the students have left after the lesson, whether it’s recess or lunch or the end of the day, teachers are going to look at the evidence of questions. They’re going to look at the sorted questions in a question routine, and they’re going to cherry pick the ones for tomorrow’s lesson. They’re going to pick the few that either align beautifully with the unit they’ve already mapped out, which is a nice move to make. If your provocation is on point, you may be able to anticipate the types of questions students are asking from the provocation, and they may beautifully fall into place with your unit as it’s mapped out right away, you may see that some of the questions that you cherry pick, oh, let me bring that lesson up. Let me bring that idea I had for two weeks from now. Let me do that now, or let me hold those questions for them. So you’re looking at the questions and you’re cherry picking the few to guide immediate next steps that we know to be best for student learning given our curricular demands and our subject areas. So you don’t need to explore all their questions. You cherry pick the few based on what they know, what they don’t know yet, and what they want to know, and then kids will explore the questions outside of school. This is something that we’ve seen beautifully with the routines. Is just because you’re not exploring them, just because you’re not assigning them, just because you’re not doing them in class, kids are going to go home and they’re going to want to talk to their parents about them. They’re going to want to look for them in their real world context. Or the next time you go to the library, you can take your students down and say, pick a book about the question that you want to explore this week. So there are all these different moves you can make to explore their questions outside of class. They don’t need to be done in class, and you want to cherry pick the few. Chrissy teachers often look at the questions and they Oh, my gosh, this is overwhelming. There are 80 questions up there. How am I supposed to get through all of those? You have to cherry pick the few to guide your immediate next steps throughout the unit. Then a question routine just doesn’t happen at the start, like as new learning occurs throughout a unit. Let’s revisit that question routine or another. These can be beautifully layered on top of one another, so from the triangle to the pencil to blooms across several weeks, you can continue to build question competence in your students, having them be come stronger. Questioners. But also you can go deeper with the learning, because as new, you know, information is acquired, their questions are very well going to change. So it’s never just at the start of the unit. We did that thing. Great. Check that box done. We want to weave these routines across a span of time, if you will. Does that make sense?

Chrissy Beltran  15:17

Chrissy, yes, it does. Does? I love the way you talked about providing that provocation. You know, obviously we do questioning throughout the unit, but initiating a new unit of study was something for kids to think about. Because I remember years ago, I attended a training, and they were talking about content area strategies, and I do not remember who the speaker was, but this one thing they said has stuck with me. So I was like a second year teacher. This was like 18 years ago, and I still remember it. She says, the problem with K, W, l charts is you put a title on the top and you say, we’re going to learn about the spleen. Okay, so what do you know? What do you want to know? And what do you know? Then afterwards, we’ll talk about, what did you learn? And kids go, Well, I don’t know anything about the spleen. I don’t want to know anything about the spleen, and I’m probably not going to learn anything about the spleen. There’s nothing to get they can’t sink their teeth into anything. It’s just like a random noun, yeah.

Trevor MacKenzie  16:04

And sometimes the few students who know something about the spleen, they dominate the con absolutely right? So the teacher is really planning and responding to the few, rather than differentiating and and targeting everyone, which is actually really easy to do when you have a provocation, and the intention of the provocation is to have it be an inclusive experience that’s really wrapped around curiosity. And I don’t mind a K, W, l chart, I really don’t. But you know, the knowledge doesn’t have to be the first thing we ask. The connections, it doesn’t need to be the first thing we ask. We can hold on to that and just have students notice what they see on provocation, what stands out to you, what colors, what language, what connections. And when we do this in a turn and talk, or when we do this as a class, the learning isn’t a student’s alone over here, or it’s not isolated, it’s not competitive, it’s it’s collaborative, it’s communal, which is a beautiful thing. They’re learning from one another. I think of our English language learners who all too often get this targeted support, but when we open it up to everyone sharing, they’re hearing this language, they’re hearing one another’s ideas. That’s really helpful for students who have particular challenges in the traditional classroom setting.

Chrissy Beltran  17:15

Chrissy, yes, I really like that. The idea that we start with noticing. I feel like once I started to start everything with noticing and observation, and then, well, what do you wonder about that? It changed. It brought out more academic language. It brought out more, you know, curiosity and purpose and motivation for kids to learn things, even in math, you know, what do you see? I’m going to put up a fraction a model. What do you notice? What do you see? And then it starts to they integrate naturally, these concepts with what they’re already what they already know, you know. And they start making those

Trevor MacKenzie  17:47

connections. Sure the teacher in the room is listening to what the students are noticing and thinking, Where are the curricular connections here? What can I curate from their noticing and bring to like a master space, a consensus space. Maybe it’s I’m making a word bank based on their noticings that I know to be the critical language of the unit of study or the content area that we’re exploring. And that’s beautiful. When the kids see Wait, we know this already, this language is in the room. It’s transformative, because they’re not waiting for me to give to tell. Because what’s the outcome of giving and telling, complacency and inactivity? But if it’s done through a lens of inclusion and equity and physical movement, where students are walking around the room exploring provocation, that’s a really different learning experience for students again, where they’re not complacent, they’re active, both physically and cognitively. So there are a lot of great outcomes. I just wanted to highlight some of the teacher moves there, right? Like, as the students are noticing we’re we’re curating, we’re picking up what’s in the room and bringing it to a space of consensus, or a visible space that we can use for next steps as well.

Chrissy Beltran  18:52

Yeah, yeah. I think that’s a piece that is kind of hazy to a lot of teachers, and that can be intimidating. It’s a little bit open ended, you know, for what they’re used to and that so moving into something like that can be a little it can feel you’re feeling discomfort, and that’s okay. And if you’re a coach working with a teacher who is struggling in that area, that is not uncommon. I have seen that a lot teachers were like, well, then what are they going to answer the questions? And what am I going to do with it? What if they ask about this? And what are they and it’s, like very stressful to start opening things up in that way, so it’s something you have to keep trying and working through over time.

Trevor MacKenzie  19:29

You know, when we say opening up, there is a more liberated learning experience, but it’s not a free for all. It’s not students, right? Whatever they want to do, clarifying some of those moves allows student teachers, excuse me, to feel a little bit more confident in spaces that perhaps they’re not as familiar with, and so part of the work we do in instructional coaching is showing what those steps are, showing those structures that teachers are implementing with their students. Because bad inquiry is a free for all right, when, when inquiry is just students being given questions or. Open ended questions and a device, and they’re said, you know, they’re tasked with going and answering these questions. That’s not helpful for anyone. It’s not fruitful for the teacher. It’s certainly not fruitful for the student. So the question routines bring structure for next steps in a really clear way, so teachers and students feel more confident and competent with regards that shift in agency in the classroom that we’re talking about. Mm, hmm,

Chrissy Beltran  20:22

okay, so then, in terms of whenever teachers are, we’re working with teachers at different levels. We’re looking at, you know, elementary, middle school, high school. How does this look? You know, what is the difference between the different age groups that we might see?

Trevor MacKenzie  20:35

Well, scaffolds are really important. You know, like I mentioned, co designing a word bank from a provocation, students are generating noticings and language, and we create some vocabulary that they can then use directly in the questions that they’re asking, so their questions are going to be more fruitful, more robust, more curricular in nature because of that language, that scaffold is something we do with the littles. You know, when I visit schools that I work with, I co teach with colleagues. I just co taught a grade one lesson first graders, that scaffold we use later on in the week with high schoolers, so that the scaffolds that students need, we the misconception is a universal support. Oh, that’s only for the grade ones and twos. That’s not something I give to 17 year olds. Your 17 year olds will benefit from very similar scaffolds. Same thing with structures. You know, we love getting students out of desks at vertical stations around the room, co designing, contributing their noticings, their ideas, to a provocation. Perhaps maybe it’s a provocation, station rotation. Chrissy, we do that with the littles. We do that with the bigs. So the misconception is some of these routines are only good, you know, at one grade level or one group of students, it’s actually they’re they’re great for all students. And I mean that sincerely, because the common components are really good learning. They don’t shift across the years from the littles to the bigs. We want them thinking, questioning, curious and active agents in their learning. So, you know, the outcomes, the questions may look different depending on the grade level. You know, maybe at the younger years we see different types of questions than the older years, but the structures are the same. What’s beautiful about schools that engage in this work is students are entering classrooms and they’re familiar with a routine already, like a teacher launches, launches the pencil, and the students say, Oh, I know what to do here. Like, I know how to engage in this thinking. I can take ownership over this experience. So that’s a beautiful piece, when most teachers in the school are using these routines to support student learning, students come in with a different level of readiness, with that agency over learning.

Chrissy Beltran  22:39

And that is, like, that’s the beautiful thing about a good strategy, is that you can use it at different levels, with different, you know, different complexity of lessons. So, like, the content is going to obviously be different in complexity, the topics are going to be different. Maybe the provocations, you know, maybe you can have a political cartoon.

Trevor MacKenzie  22:57

That was it. So, the content is different, the concepts different. The provocation is different. I would never show a seven year old the provocation I would show a 17 year old. Why? Because their little hearts and their minds. I don’t want to overwhelm I don’t want to over stimulate you. Want Your provocation to be designed to your curriculum and to the students you’re supporting, both cognitively, but also the demographic, like, like, who are the students in your room, culturally? What’s their prior knowledge? So the provocation shifts, but the routines don’t, and the questioning may look different depending on the grade level, the routines don’t shift, but the provocation really is dependent on your specific context. Chrissy, for sure. Can you share

Chrissy Beltran  23:35

a little bit about you mentioned a couple of possible provocations. Can you share a little bit about either, like, structures for provocation. Because, like, you talked about a like rotations,

Trevor MacKenzie  23:44

or, yeah, let’s talk about that one really briefly. So I just taught down in Sacramento. It’s a partnership I revisit three times a year. I taught kindergarten, I taught middle school, I taught high school across the Spanish several days the high schoolers, we did a station rotation around the room. There are several different things that we were inquiring into. We were provoking them on anchor charts, a few of them. We had images, you know, some fantastic photographs. It was an introduction to the outsiders. So we had these beautiful photos from the setting, from the era, from looking like characters they were about to read about at a few stations. We had some music on a Chromebook. They had to hit play. They had to listen to music at a few stations. We had some videos that were provoking that contextual space that they’re going to read about. And then what was nice was, as soon as they’re in the provocation, they’re examining it. The teacher and I, we can walk around the room, and we can have a look and a listen, and what are we noticing? And before we rotate them, we call a timeout and we consolidate some of what we’re seeing. Oh, we’re seeing some really amazing language bubble up. Some of you have said this kind of and we write that critical language on the board. And so students are seeing that every time we rotate them, we’re actually giving them feedback on their thinking and their ideas. Ideas. Now the beautiful thing about the rotation is when a student comes to a new station, they don’t just look at what’s left for them, they look at the thinking the previous group has left for them. So there’s this progression across each rotation in terms of complexity of thinking and detail of noticing and the language that we’re lifting up on our anchor chart. So a provocation station rotation. We did that with 30, gosh, I think we had 34 kids in the room. We had groups of four students in each provocation. We rotated them three or four times. Now we’ve got to get entry point to the unit with the kindies. We did this beautiful thing about plant cycles and the parts of plants, a plant life cycle and the parts of plants where the outcome was. We wanted students to have a deeper understanding of plants and plant life cycles and parts of plants. We actually had students physically holding different types of vegetables that we had brought in. It was so cute. Some of them had never tasted some of these vegetables. They wanted to, like, grab them and eat them and chop into them. But the first round was just like, let’s notice, and then let’s try to categorize the vegetables that you’re holding to the different parts of a plant, right? So like, a carrot is a root, right? Spinach is a leaf. So we wanted them to try to sort their vegetables to the different parts of the plant. Then we actually took the time to create a little tray where they could eat different veg. That’s like, how cool is it? You’re getting candies to eat their veg. Yeah. And then we’re asking them again, what do you notice? What do you wonder? What are some questions that you have? And then what did we do? We posted their questions to the question pencil. That was the final outcome. Okay, it was so cute we had seen we saw students eating spinach. They’d never tasted spinach before. So not only is it good for like their bodies, their nutrition, it’s really good for their thinking. So what was the provocation in in that lens, it was a tangible artifact that they could they could touch it was tactile. They could smell it. In this case, they could taste it again. Curricularly, we want those little kids flexing the senses, the five senses, they’re so important to their learning. So we’re really flexing a series of skills. So what I wanted you there was show two different kind of lesson sequences, from a station rotation to this tangible, touching a provocation, consolidating, tasting the provocation, consolidating. And those are just two structures. Chrissy, like there are dozens of structures that we can engage in for teachers to use provocation really mindfully with students, station rotation and that tangible investigation consolidation. Those are two that came to mind right away for me.

Chrissy Beltran  27:31

I love those. Thank you so much. I have one more question for you, and it is about how, as a Len instructional coach, a school leader, how can can leadership sort of help teachers start moving in this direction, integrate these into their planning? What can that look like?

Trevor MacKenzie  27:48

Yeah, well, teachers, me, being a teacher myself, I love to see these practices like this is a great conversation, Chrissy, but for for now, it’s kind of up in the ether. It’s a little bit too theory, without the photos or the video, or seeing the tangibles of what these things look like. So leaders, instructional coaches, you know, my Instagram, my LinkedIn, the book, is full of photos, and you could print those off and bring those directly to your teachers so they can see these practices in action. We’ve got video on my YouTube channel where you can see lessons that have used these practices. So seeing them helps, and even better than seeing them experiencing them. So when we visit schools, we teach teachers through actually doing the question routines themselves. I may show a number of provocation for teachers. They sort and ask questions and create word banks and and they actually sort to the question pencil or sort to the triangle. So if we want teachers to implement these strategies in their classroom, experiencing them and showing them is a big piece. I also love learning walls. Chrissy, like learning walls for kids in classrooms where there’s evidence of learning and it’s this active space of reflection and CO design. Many schools I work with, they have staff learning walls in the staff room right where these practices that we’re referring to, they’re all printed off and they’re mapped out on a staff learning wall. And then as we do this work in our classrooms, we take photos and we contribute to the learning wall. So there’s kind of like this visible visual that’s ongoingly spiraling us through our professional learning. So those are a few ideas. My Instagram, the book, the YouTube, they’re all full of really tangibles that instructional coaches and leaders can go see to bring right to their staff if they’d like awesome.

Chrissy Beltran  29:32

Thank you. So you mentioned a few places people can keep learning from you. Can you share your Instagram handle? Can you share the title of your book?

Trevor MacKenzie  29:39

Yeah. So I’ve got four books. This is the most recent one. It’s titled inquiry mindset questions edition. There are two other inquiry mindset editions. One’s about elementary school teachers, one’s for assessment, and then my first publication is dive into inquiry. It’s been most well received by middle school and high school practitioners. My website’s trevormckenzie.com where you can download all. This stuff. My Instagram is at Trev underscore. Mackenzie, I’m really active on LinkedIn, blue sky, so find me anywhere and feel free friends to reach out. Like, if you see something and you want to know more about it, just flip me a message. And I’m really open to having those conversations such as we are right now. Christine, like this was, you know, an outcome of you just reaching out and US beginning to have a rich conversation. So thank you for the invite, thanks for the work you do to support teachers, and what a great conversation we’ve had today. Really appreciate

Chrissy Beltran  30:29

you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here once I started integrating more inquiry routines into my teaching. This is when I was a teacher. I felt like so much change in my classroom, and it really helped me structure my units in a different way. It was I think they’re more motivating. It was less Okay, let me tell you what we’re going to learn, and more like I’m selecting what you’re going to see, and you are going to think about it. You’re going to notice some things. I’m training your noticing brain, I’m training your observation brain, I’m training your questioning brain, giving you opportunities to do these things, and then we would write about it and about what they were wondering. And just integrating the writing across the curriculum and the inquiry and really using that to guide even though I had to teach very specific things, you can use these structures to teach very specific things. So I hope that you got some really great ideas from that episode. Trevor was such a great guest, and I really enjoyed chatting with him. Next week, we are going to be in these in the same unit, or, sorry, the same Wow. Can I just say, Mom, brain is real, because I don’t feel like I used to have this problem as much as I do now we’re going to be in the same theme, monthly theme instruction and lesson planning, and I can’t wait to share the next episode in this installment with you. We’re going to be here for a couple of weeks because so many coaches have asked for more support in this area. And until then, happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  32:03

Now that you’ve got so much to think about, head over to buzzing with missbee.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIB and check out the podcast show notes. Happy coaching!