Ellen Fries Gymnasium in Uppsala is a municipal high school that started in the fall of 2020. It is a JA (Junior Achievement) school with programs in economics, social science as well as a small part of the natural science program. The school also has a program in sales and service, which is a vocational program, and an introductory program. The school is a merger of several units. One of these units, Uvengymnasiet, began familiarizing with the spiral of inquiry in the fall of 2018. The school got a new principal who started his first period by interviewing students based on the Spiral of inquiry, and this was the start of the school’s new development work. These interviews made visible the dilemmas that teachers and staff struggled with and aroused a great desire to try to change. Uvengymnasiet had only one program, the Introductory program. At this school there were many students who had previous school failure, who lacked trust in the system, and the school was not comprehensible to them. To meet them and help them succeed in their schoolwork, the dynamic inquiry mindset became interesting. Some of the staff went together with the management to a lecture by Dr:s Judy Halbert and Linda Kaser and they were inspired to start working with the Spiral of inquiry together with the entire workgroup at the school.

Initially, the focus was on understanding and adapting the questions to the Swedish context. We had some difficulties with how to conduct the interviews. We worked to understand the questions ourselves and then make them comprehensible to the students. We practiced asking the key questions to each other, recording the student interviews, transcribing the answers and analyzing them. We tried to hear what the students were really telling us, setting aside our own ideas of what the students needed. Practice made perfect and eventually the questions came easier to us and more naturally. We took small steps forward in the spiral and sometimes backward, but eventually arrived at a common focus area.  

During all this, it became clear that our school would be shut down and a new, larger school would open. We wanted the new school, Ellen Fries Gymnasium, to be permeated by the spiral mindset and therefore the new management and more of the new unit’s staff participated in the next lecture that Dr:s Kaser and Halbert had in Sweden.

– Hanna Sikström, vice principal

In the midst of the ongoing pandemic, the new school, Ellen Fries Gymnasium, opened the doors to welcome our new learners. The fall of 2020 was characterized by distance learning, keeping a distance to the students and each other, and everything that came with that. Despite this, we continued with the spiral work through digital meetings. Based on the focus areas we landed in, what we believed had the biggest impact, we started two major training efforts: language development work and education in trauma-aware care. Then when the restrictions eased, some of the teachers started working with observations in each other’s classrooms, where the teachers focused specifically on the start of the lesson to increase collegial learning. Other teachers started to focus more on socio-emotional learning and reception to build closer relationships with our learners.

At the start of the school year in 2022, we took the next step in our work. To refresh our knowledge of the Spiral of inquiry, we began the semester with a lecture combined with practical exercises held by two of the school’s career teachers. This resulted in us starting to interview students already at the beginning of the school year to make visible what was going on in our learning. We formed new work teams, continued to interview and be curious about the students and each other. A few weeks later, we had the privilege of having Dr Kaser, Dr Halbert together with Lillemor Rehnberg and Ingela Netz, the leaders of the network Spiral of Inquiry – Sweden, visit our school. We had the opportunity to talk about our dilemmas, what we did not quite understand or found difficult, and the opportunity to talk about our progress. We had a great learning experience together. We received an additional dose of inspiration which encouraged us to deepen our work.

After that, we try to work systematically and together with the spiral of inquiry throughout the school. The development work is led by career teachers in learning teams with collaborative learning where all the different professions that meet our students are equally important. In this way, several processes and spirals are ongoing and parallel at the school, and the school development work is permeated by an inquiry approach with the students in focus. When new staff are hired, they receive an introduction to what the spiral of inquiry is and become directly involved by participating in the practical work in the learning team. We have scheduled time for this in the work team every other week. 

We are proud that work has brought these overall successes:

• Using the Spiral of inquiry in the development work helps us to build our new school and the work we do around the student’s need, participation, and our treatment of the student 
• All new students get the first question of the key questions. After a few weeks the teacher follow-up the answer and asks the other key questions as well. If the student can’t answer the first question the teacher or some in the work team start to work with the strategy ´´two by ten´´. After some weeks there is a new follow-up with the student. 
• It is a strength to work collegially and to learn from each other when developing our working methods 
• We get feedback from colleagues at other high schools that our school is good at treating the students well and meet them in their learning and that we interview them about everything possible 
• When we interview new teachers and other school staff for a job at our school, we tell them about the development work we do and that our approach is the spiral of inquiry. If the person is hired, he gets un introduction in the spiral 
• Our principal has begun collegial development work together with a principal’s colleague. The work is about finding ways to lead the school that affect the student’s learning development the most 

About a Boy – but also a story about a learning teacher

We can call him Frank. He just turned 18 and has been in our school’s introductory program for a few years now. He is a student with high cognitive ability, it is easy for him to learn and shows his knowledge. He reflects, analyzes, and draws conclusions about most of what he learns in school and in life in general. He has high social skills and is easy to make friends with. His challenges lie outside of school. He has high absenteeism stemming from difficulties at home; illnesses, separated parents, substance abuse, and crime, which have led to his academic failures despite his talent.

At the beginning of the school year, he became my mentor student. I partially knew his history and situation because he had previously attended the school, but we didn’t know each other. I started the term by asking him the Spiral’s four key questions. Quite quickly, I could see that he knew what he was learning right now, understood what was important, and how to progress in his learning. Where he got stuck was in the first question about the social aspect. He answered a little vaguely that he could probably name several adults who believed in him. When I asked how they showed it, he replied that they told him so. The semester began and continued.

Frank continued as before with frequent absence and missed several examination opportunities in his courses. I tried to talk to him when he came to school and told him that I believed in him, called his home, talked to his parents, talked to social services, tried to motivate him to come to school, but without results. Our relationship did not deepen. He was difficult to get to know, he didn’t let me in, and I probably sighed defeatedly. Not much happened during the fall.

After a few months into the semester, I decided to ask him the spiral questions again. I emphasized the first question. Again, he answered that he could probably name a few adults at school who believed he would succeed in life. When I asked who they were and what they did, he said that all adults in school – because that is your job, but you don’t really believe it! I know I was taken aback by what he said. I tried to get him to deepen his reasoning, but he held onto the idea that was the way he saw it, that all adults in various authorities he had been in contact with during his upbringing pretended to care about students because it was their job, but they didn’t really do it. That’s how he saw all adults in different authorities.

Frank’s story touched me and kept churning in me. Frank continued to have high absenteeism, and I tried to be curious, to show that I cared about him, but other destructive forces outside of school were stronger. The months went by, and I didn’t really know how to reach him. For a long period, he didn’t come to school at all. I called him but without results, he didn’t answer. But then one day, he showed up at school and said that he had been detained by the police and that his mobile phone was seized. He said he had assaulted another boy and didn’t know what would happen now. He said he had been so scared when he was with the police of losing school and missing his chance to become eligible for high school to be able to follow he program he desired.

He had realized that he had to finish his courses to move on in life. He also told me that he had met a girl whom he had fallen in love with. She was nice, talented, and had big ambitions in life. She was studying in the USA, and he would go there to visit her during our spring break. He seemed very happy and positive and had gained a new sense of hope for the future. To continue this positive trend, my colleague Johanna and I decided to do Two by Ten with him and so we did. Frank came to school every day and started to catch up on all the tasks he had missed before. We were curious about him and spent a lot of time talking about high and low, having lunch with him, and really showing that we believed in him.

One day during lunch Frank and I were talking, we got into the topic of his future dreams and what he wanted to become in life. I said that I believed he had the ability and all the opportunities to become exactly what he wanted to be. He looked genuinely surprised and asked if I really believed that. ”Yes, absolutely,” I replied. Then he told me that he didn’t learn to read until he was ten years old. When I asked why, he said that there had been a lot of chaos at home, his father was drinking and he had many school changes. No one had read to him at home. Something changed in me at the moment. He had let me in and shown me a little bit of his world and the reality he had grown up in. Our relationship changed and deepened.

The weeks went by and the positive trend continued. Just before the next break, I decided to ask the first spiral question again. He started to answer in the same way as before, that it was the adults’ job to believe in him but they didn’t really. Then I asked him to think again if there really wasn’t anyone at school who believed in him. He thought for a moment and replied that I probably believed in him and maybe my colleague Johanna did too. I asked what I did to show that and why he now thought that I believed in him.

”It’s not what you say to me, because you’ve said it before. It’s through your body language and gestures, your smiles, and something in your gaze, the way you look at me now. You show me that you believe in me and I feel that you believe that I will succeed!”

He was probably right, I had not believed in him enough before even though I had told him that. I had not believed that he would succeed, he had failed so many times before. When I got to know him better and saw all his amazing abilities and the person he truly is, beyond school absences, beyond canceled meetings and exam opportunities, beyond suspicions of drugs and crime, I changed too and started to believe in him for real and show it!

Sadly he hasn’t come back to school after Easter break. The police called me and asked questions about him. I don’t know where he is, what he does or how this story will end. But I know that he knows that I believe in him, that he can succeed in life. For real!

– Linnea Gidlöf Drevin, teacher and learner

A vice-principal’s development program

I would like to tell you about the development program of one of my vice-principal’s. A year ago, he was given a new responsibility for a unit.

Why work with the spiral of inquiry?

Background: The unit, that the vice-principal was given responsibility for, had the last years had low study results, students with a relatively large absence from school and students who dropped out. We understood that there was a distance between teachers and students in terms of the best way of setting up lessons, there was a great demand for extra support for students and there had been a lot of changes of vice-principal the last few years.

Purpose: Since he was a new vice-principal for the unit, he wanted to get to know the students and the teachers and get a picture of the learning that was taking place. The first part of the development program would provide a basis for setting up a plan for school development and for understanding which development journey the unit needed to take.

What can you do and how do you do it?

The vice-principal had worked with the spiral of inquiry before, and he knew the background of the unit when he took on the assignment and how to lay out the work. He started to interview the classes, there were about fifteen students in every interview and it became like a group dialogue between the students. His intention was to interview a smaller group from each class, but almost everyone came because they wanted to participate, all of them. He then interviewed all students with autism spectrum disorders one by one, it was based on the answers he received after the class interviews. All interviews were documented.

In the class interviews, the students talked about the teaching and how the lessons were carried out and how the class acted. For example, in which lessons the teaching was clear and understandable and in what it was not. They also told which teachers did well, i.e., where the content was interesting, comprehensible and that it was clear what they were supposed to do in the lesson. They talked about the difference between the teaching in lessons with more practical elements and lessons with more theoretical content. The students also talked about the teacher’s expectations of the class and whether they perceived that the teacher thought they would be able to pass the course.  Teachers who had not been heard so much before received positive reviews regarding comprehensibility, clarity, and lesson structure.

The students who had been interviewed individually talked about their needs to cope with teaching, for example clarity in terms of tasks and lesson structure, that many teachers did things differently in the classroom, which was not comprehensible and manageable for them, about which workplaces in the classroom worked for the students to learn.

Sub-results – the process is still on-going

After one month

The vice-principle presented the results to the teachers, what the students talked about in the interviews, partly for each grade (the answers of the classes were combined), partly for the students who were interviewed individually.

He gave some suggestions for changes to work on for the rest of the semester, there were only two months left until summer vacation. It had little effect, the teachers who changed something were those who the students had indicated were already working motivating and in an understandable and clear way. It was maybe because the vice-principle was new and that he and the teachers had not had time to build a relationship and trust in each other and that the school year was almost over.

After four months – A new academic year starts

The vice-principal begins a university course, an education for leaders in school called “How to lead the work with the student’s health”. Together with his student’s health team he reads, discusses, twists, and turns and works practically regarding the parts of the education where he must look into his own practice. They start to look at the student’s health with completely different eyes. He has been given a working group that will help him to move forward with the development program he thinks is necessary. At the start of the new school year, he can hire an additional special education teacher, which means that he has two special education teachers who can collaborate and develop the work, they have slightly different areas of expertise.

He takes the answers he got from the student interviews and reflects on them again when he works with the university course and together with the process leaders, he starts the academic year’s development program. He challenges the teachers on a new mission for the classroom work while the student’s health team has begun to change its working methods to support salutogenic processes in the classroom. During the fall, the vice-principal has discussions with all teachers about how they teach and which strategies they use in the classroom. The teachers decide together that they will carry out a book circle around student’s learning strategies and design action options to test in teaching, the process leaders lead the book circle and the reflection groups.

After one year

More students are present in the classroom and more teachers have strategies to use if learning feels difficult for the students. Fewer students drop out or change schools from the fall semester to the spring semester, there is only a difference of three students in the number of students in the entire school. The vice-principal experiences more openness in discussing learning and lesson structure with the teachers and less skepticism. Teachers have brought questions to him to discuss teaching plans, get feed-back and anchor decisions they want to make instead of asking for permission. The follow-up meetings for the different classes have changed the focus from talking about the individual student’s difficulties and needs to talking about the class’s needs and development potential, which affects the whole and the individual in a better way than before. From the pathogenic to the salutogenic. These meetings are held once per semester.

Next reconciliation June 2023 – After one year and four months

The academic year is not over yet so we do not know what further results may come, for example if the result of the grades has changed. The focus is to build a structure that lasts in the long term, where students attend the lessons, do not drop out, are confident with the lesson plan and are interested in what they are about to learn. What the vice-principal will do soon is to interview the classes in the same way he did a year ago to see if there is any difference in what is most valuable in students’ learning but most difficult to measure.

– Ulla Klefbom, principal