Inquiry Skills and Learning progression

There is a particular kind of professional disorientation that comes with receiving a new IB document. Not panic, exactly. More like the feeling of returning to a city you know well and finding that someone has quietly rearranged the streets. The landmarks are familiar. The destination is the same. But you find yourself pausing on corners you once crossed without thinking.

That was my experience reading the IB's Inquiry Learning Progressions the first time. 

The skills listed — decision-making, questioning, role-playing, turn-taking, observation — felt at once familiar and slightly foreign. I had spent years working with ATLs, with the learner profile attributes, with the inquiry cycle. These things were not strangers. And yet here were a new set of skills, with different names that I now had to consider when planning my units of inquiry. The next time I opened the document, I was reassured to see some changes: it showed how these news skills gravitated towards certain ATLs. That made it a lot easier to digest.

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My first instinct, as it often is, was to ask where they fit. Not skeptically, but genuinely. The PYP already carries so much — a rich, carefully constructed architecture of skills and dispositions. What was this adding to what was already there?

The answer, I eventually understood, was not addition but illumination.

What the progressions offer is something deceptively simple: a description of what inquiry actually looks like, in practice, across ages five to sixteen (PYP and MYP), within and across subjects. Not inquiry as aspiration. Not inquiry as framework. Inquiry as behaviour — visible, observable, something a teacher can sit with, plan around, and recognize in her classroom.

This matters more than it might first appear. Many of us (I am assuming) have been facilitating inquiry for years on a combination of training, instinct, and professional faith. We believe in it. We have built units around it. But belief and practice are not always the same thing, and instinct, however refined, is difficult to monitor and nearly impossible to share with a colleague or a new teacher just finding their footing.

The progressions give us, at last, something to latch on to. A set of skills specific enough to observe, deliberate enough to teach, and sequenced carefully enough to tell us not just where a learner is, but where they might be going.

I return to school after March break intending to try it out. Not as an experiment, exactly. More as a long overdue act of attention. With this intention in mind, I created a template to guide me. I hope you find it useful. I have added the stages of the inquiry cycle as well so that I can work with the document no matter what stage my students are in.

Feel free to make a copy and add or delete items. Any suggestions to improve it (make it shorter for instance!) are welcome.