By Design, Not By Accident: Building a Classroom Culture for Inquiry

Collaboration is a skill students practice

Hannah opened the episode's first segment, You're a Piece of Work, with two photos from her fifth grade classroom. On the left, students play a low-stakes group game in the first week of school. On the right, about a week later, the same students research a cultural area of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and prepare a presentation.

Hannah uses the gap between those two photos to make her case about inquiry-based social studies: "This is a skill. It's not innate in all children or in most kids, right? They need practice." So the early weeks are for practicing collaboration skills themselves (how to talk with a teammate, how to communicate with kindness, how to stay focused when the table next to you gets loud), with content light enough that the teamwork gets the attention. Students then carry that feeling of working as a team into harder, content-heavy work.

Early in her career, Hannah assumed that telling students to go work with a partner was enough. Walking the classroom, she'd see one student holding the text while another stared off into space. Now she spells out what collaboration looks like on each task, like taking turns reading paragraphs or making sure everybody's handwriting appears on the poster. "I really try to set up both the what and the how before they go to work as a team," she said.

“They don't just need to know what they are doing when we ask them to work together. They need to know how that's going to look.”
Hannah Berkowitz

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Every classroom has a culture, planned or not

Since Source Material is a social studies show, LaKethia borrowed a definition from the social sciences. Anthropologists describe a culture through many elements, and she focused on three: beliefs (the values a group holds about what is good and true), language (the words and symbols it uses), and practices (the routines and rituals it repeats). Every classroom has all three, and they grow over time whether or not a teacher shapes them. "So you're either going to plan for your classroom culture or it's just going to happen," she said.

Hannah then asked about LaKethia's coaching work and a time when culture wasn't taking hold by October. LaKethia described a teacher who cared deeply about his students and wanted them to speak up and make choices. Wary of being controlling, he let disruptive behavior go unchecked until it snowballed. The realization they reached together was that "sharing power is not the same thing as letting go of your classroom completely." So they rehearsed the culture explicitly, practicing what it sounds like to enter a group conversation or repair a conflict, and trying redirections that keep the lesson moving.

When a culture feels too far gone, LaKethia's advice is to treat it like any lesson that didn't stick: "just like you reteach academic content when the kids don't get it, you can reteach culture." Start with the one routine creating the biggest barrier to inquiry, name what success looks and sounds like, practice it, and follow through consistently.

“It's not a classroom without boundaries. It's a classroom where boundaries ensure that students can have their voices heard.”
LaKethia White

Three pillars: curiosity, conflict, and change

When Cornelius Minor joined, he named what stood out in Hannah's practice: her intentionality, and her plan for when things fall apart. "Because it will fall apart," he said, so he keeps a recovery plan in his back pocket. He then described the three pillars he constructs in an inquiry-based classroom, so that when everything else falls apart, the pillars hold and the class can rebuild.

The first pillar is curiosity. "Every human on the planet is born curious, but often curiosity is socialized out of us," he said, so his early-year teaching centers on curiosity activities that remind students of something they already had.

Conflict comes second, in ideas, behaviors, identities, and actions. Cornelius compares a classroom to a skyscraper designed to flex and sway: "if I build a classroom and I don't build that classroom to be conflict proof, then I'm doing it wrong." Change is the third pillar, which means teaching students how to change their minds and that it's okay to do so, a skill he sees many adults struggling with right now.

“I am simply reminding kids that they were born curious.”
Cornelius Minor

Leaders make inquiry visible beyond one classroom

LaKethia then pushed the conversation to the building and district levels. Cornelius drew on Carter G. Woodson's idea that classrooms are permeable spaces shaped by the society around them, so a leader who wants inquiry alive in classrooms has to keep it alive in faculty meetings and professional learning too. A principal, in his words, is the lead learner: "I have to model here's what it looks like to not know in public."

For district leaders, Cornelius offered Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue as a model, and the lesson is about structure. Davis started with a clear goal, the mood he wanted the album to capture. He chose a technique, and he invited John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley because they knew it. Cornelius sees the same three jobs for a district leader: set the specific goal, lay out how the district will get there, and bring in the teachers and coaches with the expertise to do the work. What a leader can’t do is dictate every note. “I invited you here because you have the expertise,” he said. “I invited you here because you understand the vision.” With that structure in place, he looks for signs the vision is taking hold: teachers who can talk about it, and students who ask big questions, make connections, and draw conclusions.

For teachers whose district systems reward compliance over inquiry, Cornelius recommended action research. At his middle school, he and his colleagues noticed that the students spending the most time in the hallway were often the ones who struggled most with reading, and that they were avoiding embarrassment. They redesigned the first seven minutes of class around hands-on, collaborative activities where students could succeed early, tested it for 10 days, and brought the results to their principal. "We're not approaching the principal with complaints. Actually, we're approaching the principal with data," he said.

“Nothing on the album was planned, but everything on the album was intentional.”
Cornelius Minor

What This Means for Practice

For teachers, the first weeks of school are the time to teach routines on purpose. Pick the routines you'll return to all year, like Hannah's Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up, and practice them with low-stakes questions first, so students already know the moves when the content gets harder. When a routine slips, reteach it the way you'd reteach a math concept.

For coaches, the work starts with listening. When a teacher pushes back on something new, Cornelius asks what that person needs, whether that's time, a practice partner, or flexibility. He described rehearsing hard lessons with a colleague in the hallway before students arrived, so neither of them tried something for the first time in front of a class.

For school and district leaders, the message is to model inquiry in how the adults learn: name what you don't know, and treat evidence from classrooms, like the results of a teacher's action research, as the way decisions get made.

Closing Reflection

Near the end of the conversation, Cornelius said that what exists in a classroom today becomes our society tomorrow. Hannah's first-week routines and a principal willing to not know in public point in the same direction. A culture for inquiry takes intention at every level, and each of those levels has a next step it can take this week.