Designing Inquiries That Matter: Targeting Significance, Diversity, and Fit

Quality teaching effectively expands the spaces we have to work together as educators, within and across subject areas, to collaboratively design meaningful inquiries with topics, texts, and tools that matter to students and make a difference in society. Supporting inquiry in our classrooms means targeting topics of significance to students’ lives, diversity in the perspectives, genres, and complexities of the texts we explore, and fit in the design and use of tools that are responsive to students’ cultural, linguistic, and community resources and interests. Designing inquiry for significance, diversity, and fit means purposefully engaging students in literacy that matters.