Teaching as Inquiry: What Classroom Practice Taught Me About Research

Before I could name my research questions, I lived them in a classroom.

Teaching grades 6–8 in an under-resourced Delhi public school through Teach For India meant working inside the very systems I now study: uneven access, curricula that often felt disconnected from students’ lives, and teachers doing enormous work with limited structural support. What surprised me was how much student curiosity persisted despite those constraints — and how often the curriculum got in the way of it.

That tension — between what students are capable of and what school asks of them — became the thread I have followed since.

From practice to questions

When I moved into curriculum design and teacher preparation roles, the questions got sharper. Why do some teachers manage to create inquiry-rich environments even in constrained settings, while others with similar resources and intentions do not? What does it actually take to shift a school’s culture of learning, not just its lesson plans?

These are not abstract questions for me. They are grounded in watching specific students in specific classrooms — and in my own failures as a first-year teacher who thought a good lesson plan was the same as good teaching.

What research can do that practice cannot

Research lets me step back far enough to see patterns across contexts. When I read studies on contextual curriculum design in India, or on STEM access for girls in under-resourced settings, I am reading about the students I taught and the colleagues I worked alongside. That recognition is not nostalgia — it is a kind of data.

The promise of education research, for me, is that it can surface what practitioners already sense but cannot always articulate, and translate that into frameworks and evidence that change what schools do.

I am still early in that project. But the classroom is where I learned to take the questions seriously.