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This paper focuses on the profile of “Hannah”, a first grade teacher, who was having a successful first year of teaching until February when her principal shifted gears. At this point administration expected, as Hannah quoted her principal, “to walk into your classroom, at any point of the day, and see you in front of the classroom and the kids sitting at desks answering bubble-in questions and not talking to each other.” Rather than being discouraged by this, Hannah turned to her knowledge of practitioner inquiry to systematically study and stand behind the professional decisions she knew she needed to make to provide her students with meaningful learning experiences. This paper used phenomenological interviewing to solicit the story of Hannah’s journey. Using Hannah’s own words crafted from transcribed interviews, this paper discusses the importance of incorporating practitioner inquiry in preservice teacher education programs for the purposes of developing an inquiry stance. Hannah Jefferson had a successful first six months of teaching. She was hired to teach first grade, fresh out of her teacher preparation program, at a brandnew elementary school. By December, she was seeing academic improvement in her students, was looked up to by her teaching colleagues, and had impressed her principal. And then in February that all changed. I thought it was going well. But the principal came in again around February and gave me the complete opposite [feedback after an] observation...She literally told me, ‘I feel bad for all of the students in your class because they have you as a teacher and they haven’t learned anything all year.’ I know that she is wrong. I know I’m a good teacher. If I was a different first-year teacher, there was no way I would continue teaching after that. Hannah credits this perseverance and confidence to the inquiry stance she developed in her teacher preparation program. In the book that first coined the term “inquiry stance,” Inside Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge (1993), Cochran-Smith and Lytle describe inquiry stance as: The position teachers and others who work together in inquiry communities take toward knowledge and its relationships to practice...Across the life span, an inquiry stance provides a kind of grounding within the changing cultures of school reform and competing political agendas. (pp. 288-289) 1 Wolkenhauer and Hooser: Inquiry is Confidence Published by Scholar Commons, 2017 Many teacher preparation programs value the inquiry process for its potential to engage student teachers in active, practice-based problem solving. However, few programs recognize the importance of moving beyond engaging in the formal inquiry process as an assignment for the university to inquiry as a stance; a way of work and being as a teacher (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; 2009; Wolkenhauer, Boynton, & Dana, 2011). It is known that engaging in practitioner inquiry as an intentional part of field experiences holds promise for developing teachers who are able to meet the learning needs of K-6 students (Cochran-Smith, 1991; Dawson, 2007; Donnell & Harper, 2005). However, there are few examples in the literature that describe the ways first year teachers engage in inquiry after developing inquiry stances in their preservice teacher education programs. The purpose of this paper therefore, is to provide an example of one such first-year teacher and the ways the development of an inquiry stance supported her professionally.

“Inquiry is Confidence”: How Practitioner Inquiry Can Support New Teachers