Years 9–10 | Kete Whakataki — Starter Pack

Lesson 3: Inquiry & Independent Learning Skills

Turning a topic you were handed into a question you can actually answer — and knowing, before you start, what would count as an answer.

Ngā Whāinga Akoranga — Learning Intentions

WALT: I can turn a topic I am given into a question I can actually answer.

WILF: You can take a broad topic and produce a narrower question, say what evidence would answer it, and explain why one of your earlier attempts was unanswerable.

Whakataukī | Traditional Wisdom

“Kāore te kūmara e kōrero mō tōna ake reka.”

The kūmara does not speak of its own sweetness.

Te Whakatakotoranga | Run of show

  1. Do Now — Which of these could you finish? 8 min
  2. Act 1 — Narrow it until it is answerable 15 min
  3. Act 2 — What would count as an answer? 15 min
  4. Act 3 — Two sources, one disagreement 15 min
  5. Synthesise — The question is the work 8 min
  6. Exit ticket 4 min

Tirohanga Whānui | What this lesson is doing

The most common way an inquiry project fails is not laziness. It is that the student was working on a question nobody could have answered in three weeks with a school library and a laptop — and nobody told them that at the start, because it looked like a fine question.

So this lesson teaches the two moves that prevent it. Narrow the question until it is answerable, and decide in advance what evidence would settle it. The second move is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that converts an inquiry from an essay about a topic into an actual finding. Students should leave able to look at their own question and predict whether it will work.

You'll need

  • A real topic students will be given this term in another subject. Borrow one from a colleague — this lesson is much stronger when the practice is not hypothetical.
  • Two short sources that disagree about the same thing for Act 3. A local issue works best; a council consultation, a proposed development, a change to a public space.
  • Paper. Devices are optional and mostly unhelpful until Act 3.

Do Now — Which of these could you finish? 8 min

What it is: A sorting task that makes "answerable" a property students can see rather than a word they are told.

Run it

  1. Put up four questions (1 min): Is climate change bad? · How has the number of cars at our school changed since 2019? · What is the meaning of life? · Why did our local council close the pool?
  2. Sort in pairs (4 min): which could you finish by Friday with the resources you actually have? Rank them, do not just tick.
  3. Take the reasoning (2 min): students will say the second and fourth are doable and articulate exactly why — you know where to look, and you would know when you had the answer.
  4. Name the two tests (1 min): write on the board — Can I get the evidence? and Would I know when I had it? Those are the whole lesson.

Act 1 — Narrow it until it is answerable 15 min

What it is: The narrowing move, practised repeatedly on a real topic rather than explained once.

Run it

  1. Start too big, on purpose (2 min): take the borrowed topic and write the widest possible version. "Pollution." Everyone agrees it is unanswerable. Good.
  2. Narrow four times (7 min): in pairs, write four successively narrower versions. Each step must add one of: a place, a time, a group of people, or a measurable thing. Pollution → water pollution → water pollution in our awa → how the nitrate level in our awa has changed since the dairy conversion upstream.
  3. Find where it turned (3 min): at which step did it become answerable? Usually step three. Students can feel the change, and naming it is what makes the skill transferable.
  4. Check for over-narrowing (3 min): a question can also become too small to be worth doing. "How many bins are outside C block?" is answerable and pointless. The target is the narrowest question still worth asking — say that phrase out loud.
The four narrowing moves
Add a…Turns this…Into this
PlaceWhy do people leave school early?Why do students leave our school before Year 13?
TimeHas the town changed?How has the main street changed since the supermarket opened?
GroupIs the bus service good?Is the bus service usable for students who finish at 5pm?
Measurable thingIs our field in bad condition?How many days last term was the field closed for use?

Act 2 — What would count as an answer? 15 min

What it is: The move students skip. Deciding the evidence before doing the research.

Run it

  1. Write the evidence plan (5 min): for their narrowed question, students write three lines — what evidence would answer this, where that evidence lives, and who holds it.
  2. Test for the fatal case (4 min): swap with another pair. The reviewer asks one question: "if the evidence you need does not exist or nobody will give it to you, what happens to this inquiry?" Some questions die here. That is a success — dying in week one costs nothing, dying in week four costs the whole project.
  3. Predict the finding (4 min): each pair writes what they expect to find, sealed and set aside. This is not cheating. Knowing your expectation in advance is how you notice later that you found what you wanted rather than what was there.
  4. Name the trap (2 min): a question you already know the answer to is not an inquiry, it is a decoration. If the prediction feels certain, the question is probably too easy.

Act 3 — Two sources, one disagreement 15 min

What it is: Handling conflicting evidence — the situation that actually arises, rather than the tidy single-source version.

Run it

  1. Read both (4 min): two short sources that disagree about the same local issue. Students read and write, in one sentence each, what each source claims.
  2. Find the disagreement's type (5 min): are they disagreeing about facts (what happened), interpretation (what it means), or values (what should be done)? Most disagreements students meet are the third kind dressed as the first.
  3. Ask who is speaking (4 min): for each source — who wrote it, what do they want, and what would they gain if you believed them? Not to dismiss them. A person with an interest can still be right, and saying so is important; students over-apply "biased" as a way of ignoring sources.
  4. Decide anyway (2 min): with both sources in front of them, what is the most defensible thing they can say? Usually a narrower claim than either source makes. That is what a good finding looks like.

The correction worth making

"It is biased so it is wrong" is the most common move Year 9 students make with sources, and it is a way of avoiding the work. Bias tells you what to check, not what to discard. If both sources are interested parties — and they usually are — you cannot discard your way to an answer.

Synthesise — The question is the work 8 min

Run it

  1. Compare start and end (3 min): students put their original topic beside their final question. The distance between them is the actual skill of this lesson.
  2. The whakataukī (2 min): the kūmara does not speak of its own sweetness — a claim is worth what its evidence is worth, not what the person asserting it says about it. That applies to their own inquiry as much as to their sources.
  3. Forward link (3 min): "You now have a question you can answer on your own. Next lesson: doing it with three other people, which is harder."

Exit ticket 4 min

Two lines: your final question, and the one piece of evidence that would most change your answer.

The second line is the one worth marking. A student who can name what would change their mind has understood inquiry; a student who cannot has written an opinion with references.

Ngā Huarahi Ako | Differentiation

Tautoko / Support

  • Give the Act 1 narrowing with the first two steps done, so the task is continuing a pattern.
  • Provide the four narrowing moves as physical cards to lay against a question.
  • For Act 3, use two sources with a plain factual disagreement rather than a values one — the type-sorting step is much harder than it looks.
  • Accept the exit ticket as the question plus a single word for the evidence.

Toitoi / Extension

  • Take a question that died in Act 2 and rescue it. What would have to change — the timeframe, the place, the evidence you settle for — to make it answerable without making it trivial?
  • Find a third source on the Act 3 issue that disagrees with both. Does it change the most defensible claim, or just add noise?
  • Write the question you would ask if you had a year and could talk to anyone. Then write the version you could do this term. Comparing them is what researchers actually do.

Te reo Māori

  • Kupu: pātai (question) · rangahau (research, inquiry) · taunakitanga (evidence) · whakaaro · mātauranga.
  • Rangahau is worth using as the name for what students are doing all term, rather than "research project" — it carries the sense of seeking rather than collecting.

Mātauranga Māori | Who the knowledge belongs to

School inquiry usually treats information as freely available — you find it, you use it, you cite it. That model works for a council report. It does not describe all knowledge, and students doing local inquiries will meet the difference quickly.

Some knowledge is held, not published. Kōrero about a place, a whakapapa, an account of what happened at a particular site — these belong to particular people, and access to them comes through relationship and permission rather than through searching. A student whose inquiry touches a marae, a wāhi tapu, or an iwi's history is not doing a harder version of the same task. They are doing a different task, one whose first step is asking.

The practical rule for a Year 9 inquiry: if the evidence you need belongs to someone, the plan in Act 2 has an extra line — who do I ask, and how do I ask well? That is not an obstacle to the inquiry. For a local question it is usually the best evidence available.

Hononga Marautanga | Curriculum

Interpretations are strengthened when supported by evidence from the text.

Te Mātaiaho (2025) · English · Phase 4 · Text Studies · statement id 15971

The statement is written about reading a text; this lesson extends the same principle upstream to the question itself, and the extension is stated rather than hidden. If an interpretation needs evidence to stand, then a question is only worth asking when you can say in advance what evidence would support an answer to it. Act 2 makes that the explicit test, which is why questions are allowed to fail there — a question no evidence can reach produces an interpretation nothing can strengthen.

Sources and checking