Teachers' and Students' Perceptional Changes through the Schoolwide Promotion of Personal Inquiry

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the initiatives of a public elementary school in Tokyo that promotes personal inquiry schoolwide, focusing on the perceptional changes of both teachers and students.The study examined the relationships between students’ perceptional changes toward the personal inquiry learning process and teachers’ perceptional changes regarding their professional duties, instructional roles, and workload.The results revealed that students’ perceptional understanding of the inquiry process either remained significantly high or showed significant improvement after engaging in personal inquiry.Teachers’ perceptional awareness of conducting student-centered lessons and co-learning with students also increased significantly.Furthermore, teachers’ perceptional evaluations of work?life balance remained significantly high, and their perceptional sense of physical and mental well-being was not negatively affected.These findings suggest that the schoolwide implementation of personal inquiry led to an increase in student-centered instructional practices.Moreover, this initiative proved to be a sustainable approach that did not impose excessive burdens on teachers, demonstrating the feasibility of promoting personal inquiry across the whole school.