Video · Teachers Media
Collaborative Enquiry
Collaborative enquiry is what happens when a group of teachers takes a shared question about their practice — What actually helps our pupils explain their reasoning? — and works through it together over weeks, using evidence from their own classrooms. Done well, it's one of the most reliable ways to develop teachers, precisely because the learning is anchored in real problems the group has chosen.
About this video
Collaborative enquiry sits inside a wider family of professional-learning approaches — lesson study, teacher research groups, action research, Japanese jugyō kenkyū — that all share the same three ingredients: a shared question, a plan for gathering evidence in real classrooms, and a structured way of making sense of what turns up. What separates enquiry from ordinary CPD is that the group holds the question open. Nobody arrives with the answer.
The best-known evidence for its impact comes from the extensive Teacher Learning Communities literature, and more recently from large-scale UK trials of lesson study and other collaborative professional-learning models. The pattern in the evidence is consistent: change in pupil outcomes tends to require sustained enquiry cycles rather than one-off sessions, and it requires the group to be genuinely willing to hold each other accountable — not just chat pleasantly about pedagogy.
For a school or department starting out, the practical structure matters more than the theory. Successful groups tend to have: a facilitator who can hold the discipline of enquiry (not solve it for people); a defined evidence protocol (whose data, gathered how, discussed when); and enough shared time to actually meet — three or four hour-long sessions across a term, not fifteen minutes at the end of a Friday.
What a typical enquiry cycle looks like
- Frame the question. The group picks a genuine puzzle — not "how do we do X" but "what actually happens when we try X, and what does it change for pupils?"
- Read and plan. A short read of relevant evidence, then a shared plan: what will each person try, and what will they collect?
- Try and gather. Two to four weeks of enacting the plan in classrooms, gathering pupil work, observation notes, or short recordings.
- Analyse together. The group meets, brings their evidence, and looks across it. What did we learn? What surprised us? What do we want to try next?
- Refine. Adjust the approach, start the next cycle — or close the enquiry and share the findings with the wider staff.
The common failure modes
- The one-off workshop trap. A single 90-minute session called "enquiry" doesn't give the enquiry time to happen. It's the cycles that matter.
- The confirmation trap. Groups collecting evidence to prove their prior beliefs, rather than to test them. A facilitator helps here by asking "what would change your mind?"
- The unbounded scope trap. "How do we raise attainment?" is not a question you can enquire into in a term. "What happens when we replace teacher-modelled answers with pupil-modelled ones in Year 8 maths?" is.
Discussion prompts
- What is the last thing you tried in your practice, at least partly, because you were curious to see what would happen? What did you learn?
- Who in your school could you enquire alongside? What question would you both find genuinely interesting?
- What would need to be true about protected time and psychological safety for a group like this to work in your school?
Try this in your classroom
- Pair up with one colleague and pick a shared question about your practice. Agree what you'll each try over the next fortnight, and set a coffee-length meeting to look at what happened.
- Read one short evidence summary from the EEF or Chartered College and bring it to a department meeting with a "what would we need to see in our classrooms to know this is landing?" prompt.
- If your school runs INSET, propose replacing one session with three shorter enquiry meetings across the term.