The relationship between teacher inquiry and teacher professional growth:

• By cultivating this inquiry stance toward teaching, teachers play a critical role in enhancing their own professional growth and ultimately the experience of schooling for children. Thus, an inquiry stance is synonymous with professional growth and provides a non-traditional approach to staff development that can lead to meaningful change for children.

Teacher Inquiry involves:

• (1) clarifying and diagnosing a practical situation that needs to be improved or a practical problem that needs to be resolved
• (2) formulating action strategies to improve the situation or resolve the problem
• (3) implementing the action strategies and evaluating their effectiveness
• (4) clarifying the situation, resulting in new definitions of problems or areas for improvement, and so on, to the next spiral of reflection and action.