#386 – The Importance of Inquiry in Learning, with Trevor MacKenzie

In this episode of Unpacking Education, we’re joined by author, educator, and inquiry consultant Trevor MacKenzie to explore the powerful role of curiosity in learning. Trevor shares how authentic inquiry can transform disengaged classrooms into thriving learning communities and how the simple act of sparking student curiosity leads to deeper thinking, better questions, and meaningful engagement. Whether you’re new to inquiry-based learning or ready to deepen your practice, this conversation offers actionable strategies, like designing effective provocations, building question competence, and scaffolding student agency. Tune in to reimagine what it means to center curiosity in the classroom.

Curiosity is a powerful thing.

Trevor MacKenzie, in his blog post, Inquiry is Curiosity

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• Engage Students Through Inquiry Learning (article collection)
• Engage Students by Cultivating Their Curiosity (article)
• Wrap Authentic Project-Based Learning in Inquiry (article)
• AI and Inquiry (article)
• WICOR® and AI: Inquiry (podcast episode)

The Power of Curiosity

Curiosity is more than a spark—it’s the fuel that drives deep learning. Trevor MacKenzie explains how inquiry-based learning can transform classrooms by centering student voice, agency, and authentic engagement. “Inquiry is curiosity,” Trevor says. “If our kids aren’t curious, if they’re not switched on, we’re going to lose a lot of those amazing skills that we know are important for today’s world.” The following are a few highlights from this episode.

• About Our Guest: Trevor MacKenzie is a high school English teacher from Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada. While he has spent the majority of his career teaching high school, he’s taught all grade levels, from kindergarten all the way up to high school. Trevor is also an author, keynote speaker, and international inquiry consultant.
• Motivation to Improve: Trevor shares, “When I started to teach quite early on, I was really struck by disengaged students.” Many of these were at-risk youth who didn’t connect with the curriculum. He explains that, for these students, “the curriculum was not something that they were willing to explore. There was a lack of relevance in their schooling experiences.” Because of that, he says he spent the first seven years of his career “really figuring out how to flip the script to a certain degree and how to have the curriculum come alive for students—how to build really strong relationships with kids in school that perhaps wanted to not be there.”
• Building on the Experts: Trevor shares that inquiry-based learning is not new and that he has built his interest and expertise on the experts that have come before him. He says, “It’s generations old for that matter, and we are truly standing on the shoulders of giants. So, I’d say my authorship, my consultancy, my research is contemporary in that regard.”
• A Definition: In its simplest terms, Trevor says, “Inquiry is curiosity.” He adds, “If we’re getting our kids curious about what they’re learning about, we’re already on the train. We’re already doing a lot of the work.”
• Skill Building: Inquiry is a pathway to developing life skills. Trevor says, “If our kids aren’t curious, if they’re not switched on, we’re going to lose a lot of those amazing skills that we know are important for today’s world, right? Critical thinking, communication, collaboration—all those things come as a byproduct of curiosity.”
• A Helpful Resource: When Trevor was wrestling with teaching in his early years in the profession, a teacher librarian at his school gave him a book to read, Understanding by Design, by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. It was the right book at the right time for Trevor, and it opened him up to new ideas in his teaching. Since then, he says, “Jay’s turned into a mentor and friend.”
• Expanding a Career: Early in his consulting career, Trevor took a chance and paid his own way to speak at a conference. As it turns out, he explains, “There was a publisher in that audience who listened to me share some stories from my classroom, and she asked me to write a book. . . . And that book turned into four books, and global partnerships, and sharing this work more broadly, and engaging in some really rich research at higher ed, exploring what it means to teach from an inquiry stance.”
• Caring Colleagues: Trevor calls out the value of colleagues helping colleagues. He says, “I think what makes school so amazing is when we care about each other, when we’re engaged in rich learning, and we got each other’s backs.”
• Starting With Provocation: Trevor says, “For teachers who are new to this work, a first step we need to take is try to get our students curious about our curricular outcomes. Try to get our kids curious about our curricular objectives. In the inquiry-teaching school of thinking, this is called provocation. We want to design something that is going to ignite their wonderment, ignite their curiosities. . . . And then, an outcome of provocation should be student-generated questions, like questions that they want to know about. And if we design provocation really beautifully, then that’s the entry point into the curriculum.”
• Provocation in Elementary: Recently, in a first grade classroom, Trevor and a co-teacher used 2-minute segments of a video about polar bears wandering into Churchill, Manitoba, to spur student interest. Students engaged in turn-and-talk activities and then generated keywords and questions as Trevor used anchor charts to record the relevant vocabulary that students were pulling from the videos. After that, he says, “I ask them to ask questions about what they’re wondering about—what they’re curious about.” With the littles, he suggests giving them question stems to provide structure and scaffolding.
• Provocation in Secondary: Trevor and his co-teacher hung pages from the graphic novel, Maus, around the room as anchor charts. He explains, “We rotated them through the graphic novel pages, asking them to identify things that we know they’re going to have to identify on the summative assessment—symbolism, conflict imagery, figurative language, all those rich things we know they need—but it’s done in a collaborative nature.”
• Question Routines: Trevor’s most recent book is Inquiry Mindset Questions Edition: Cultivating Curiosity and Creating Question Competence. He explains, “There are 10 high-impact question routines in the book.” Each routine has a visual element to it to help students grasp and process it. During this episode, he unpacks one routine in detail: a continuum of closed- to open-ended questions. Once students brainstorm indicators of what each type of question means, they use those descriptors to generate questions and place them along the continuum.
• Multiple Pathways: Once questions have been generated, teachers can go several ways with the process. Trevor says, “You could have it be very individualized and very agentic—students are choosing their own pathway from that overarching experience—or you can have it be a group experience, what we call a class inquiry.” Some of this depends on how well students have developed the skills necessary to work independently. Typically, inquiry early in the school year is more guided, and inquiry at the end becomes more independent as students master the skills needed to be successful.
• Importance of Routines: Trevor says, “For every step of independence and agency in the classroom, we need to provide structures and routines, so students feel competent, and they can be successful. So, the routines help us map out that structure for independence. . . . Definitely a gradual release across the months, where, at the end of the year, it’s a showcase of independent learning and free inquiry.”
• Self-Checking: Teachers should be self-aware and examine their own teaching practice. Trevor says, “If you’re curious, you’re going to go in and really be reflective, like: ‘How are my students doing today? What’s the temperature for learning today? What do I have planned? Do I need to adjust? Do I need to pivot?’”
• Relationships First: Trevor reflects, “There’s nothing more important than knowing the students you support. There are so many districts I work with who have adopted something like a ‘know me before you teach me’ philosophy.” These districts spend the first part of the year intentionally building classroom community. Trevor points out, “The most important aspects of my planning are the students before me, and I need to get to know them.”
• AI in the Classroom: “I’m cautiously optimistic,” says Trevor. While AI can be a helpful aid in some aspects of planning, such as developing assessments, Trevor cautions not to offload the craft of lesson planning completely to chatbots. To do it well, lesson designers must know their students—something chatbots cannot do nearly as well as humans. Trevor says, “I don’t think AI has that pulse, that temperature check, of your classroom.”
• Triangulation: When using AI to provide formative feedback, Trevor believes that it’s important to triangulate the feedback with the chatbot, teacher, and student, or with the chatbot, peers, and the student. He says, “What that allows teachers to do is not be the sole feedback provider, but [it] actually frees them up to sit with children and ask them if they understand the feedback or triangulate the feedback. Does the teacher agree with the feedback? And so, you’re actually seeing teachers have more time to sit with kids because they’re incorporating some AI into the feedback cycle.”
• AI in the Inquiry Process: During the inquiry process, AI can be helpful with organizing and sorting research into trends or subcategories. This can help students scaffold this complex task as their executive functioning develops. Trevor says, “And then, once we have that sorted and organized . . . the teacher comes in to confer with children and students and talk about what it is that they’re noticing.”
• Sketchnotes: Trevor has a batch of sketchnotes on his website, several of which help break down and explain concepts discussed in this episode.
• Toolkit: For his toolkit item, Trevor offers a list of authors whose works he would recommend exploring, including Jay McTighe, Grant Wiggins, Kath Murdoch, Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, Peter Liljedahl, and Guy Claxton.
• One Thing: Trevor often asks himself this question: “What am I doing for my students that they should be doing for themselves?” He shares, “I find the more times I ask that question, the more I find more space to empower kids and have them do more of the heavy lifting and meaningful work in the classroom.”