A Kaleidoscope of Inquiry:
A Unique Opportunity to Explore Perspectives and Possibilities for Inquiry-Based Learning

Chapters International is thrilled to announce an exciting opportunity for educators, happening on 22nd & 23rd November 2025 in beautiful Hong Kong

The Kaleidoscope of Inquiry Conference brings together 4 globally renowned educators who will invite participants to take a deep dive into the transformative potential of inquiry-based practices in classrooms, staff rooms and communities at large. Our presenters reflect a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences from teaching preschool through to senior secondary schools and universities. They have worked around the world in a range of settings and bring unique perspectives on the ways in which inquiry can be harnessed for powerful learning.

We hope you can join us.

Kath Murdoch

The Pedagogy of Inquiry
“I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous.” (Ginnott, H 1972)

We have known for a long time that the key to improving student learning is for teachers themselves to have opportunities to strengthen their own pedagogy - focussing on HOW we teach, not simply what. This is no easy feat when we are bombarded with demands that so often fall outside our core work. This workshop turns the spotlight back onto the complex, fascinating experience of teaching through, for an as inquiry. It explores the relationship between the ‘moves’ we make in the classroom and student learning including our approach to questioning, our deliberate ‘noticing’, the release of responsibility, ways we cultivate curiosity and the deliberate emphasis on learning to learn.

Based on the popular resource “The Art of Inquiry” Kath Murdoch will guide participants through 10 practices designed to build a solid repertoire of strategies and teaching approaches in-keeping with an inquiry stance. These practices are applicable across the curriculum and year levels. This is a workshop about the thing that connects all of us - no matter what our role in school - the art of teaching.

Trevor MacKenzie

Question Routines, Curiosity, and Cultures of Co-Design
Trevor MacKenzie facilitates learning from his recently released fourth publication, Inquiry Mindset Questions Edition. Question Routines are designed to help teachers leverage student-generated questions to help plan next steps in learning. These routines call on students to sort, organize, justify, and revise their questions and in doing so, help them become more competent questioners themselves. Mr. MacKenzie will demonstrate strategies to plan for curiosity through the lens of provocations, facilitate learning of the ten high impact Question Routines from the publication, and examine how these routines align with inquiry teaching and learning.

Mark Church

Establishing Patterns of Thinking in the Inquiry Classroom
In the worldwide Cultures of Thinking project, thinking routines are used regularly to help make learners’ thinking visible and to deepen their understanding, especially as they pursue inquiry that is meaningful to them. In this session, participants will have a chance to learn about and engage with thinking routines, considering them as tools and structures that support rich patterns of inquiry behavior.

Alice Jungclaus

Inquiring into Movement as a Key for Wellbeing and Creativity
As the sitting epidemic worsens in the workplace and classroom, how can we use movement as a way to promote wellbeing and creativity when designing and implementing inquiries? In this session, we will explore how structured and unstructured movement can be methods to enhance attention, increase resilience and become more adaptable in the learning environment. Our focus will be on drama techniques and rhythmic routines to enable learners to experience a flow state.

Kath Murdoch

Growing learning assets: how an inquiry stance helps nurture vital competencies
Across the world, there is growing evidence of the importance of nurturing the kinds of competencies needed to thrive in an increasingly complex and challenging world. Being curious, adventurous, resilient, coupled with the skills of self-management, collaboration, thinking, and communication are amongst what we can think of as ‘assets’ for learning. Growing these assets in our learners helps set them on a path to independence, contribution to community and a love of learning for life.

These skills and dispositions do not grow by chance – they are best developed through an explicit, thoughtful, embedded approach that embodies an inquiry stance. The role of the educator is pivotal. In this interactive workshop, Kath will draw upon her vast experience of introducing her ‘learning assets’ to schools all over the world and sharing really practical ways to effectively embed skills and dispositions for learning into our work with young people and their families.

Trevor MacKenzie

Transforming the Landscape of Assessment
Trevor MacKenzie deepens our understanding of assessment with a lens on supporting learners in understanding where they are in their learning and where they need to go next in their learning. Mr. MacKenzie is an educator in British Columbia, Canada, who teaches in a public school system world renowned for its rich formative assessment practice and competency focused standards. In this highly engaging offering you will participate in activities that align learning standards with reflective exercises to empower students in understanding themselves as learners. You will design assessment activities that are infused with student voice aimed at transforming grading practices to move beyond merely providing students with a letter grade or percentage score. Transforming the Landscape of Assessment will provide sensible and time effective strategies to support student growth in the classroom.

Mark Church

Exploring Powerful Visible Thinking Practices: The Conversation Continued
When used powerfully, thinking routines not only provide teachers with a set of practices to engage students in deep and meaningful inquiry, but help advance a broader goal to create classrooms where students’ thinking is visible, valued, and actively promoted. Continuing from the first workshop, participants will consider just what difference using thinking routines and other visible thinking practices makes for students and teachers and how teachers can plan to use these practices to maximum effect.

Alice Jungclause

Inquiring into Language as a Tool for Connection and Collaboration
Language is one of the most important routes to understanding, so how can we use it to the highest extent of its possibilities in the classroom? In this session, we will consider verbal and non-verbal communication to support the potential of learners. Our focus will be on strategies for increasing confident exchange, by employing techniques for healthy engagement during the learning process, promoting self-assurance and keeping the vitality of the classroom intact.

USD 850 Per Participant Till 15th November 2025
Early Bird Offer USD 800 Per Participant Till 1st September 2025
Group Discount is USD 700 Per Participant for a Group of 10 or More Participants Till 1st October 2025

Includes - Certificate of Participation for 16 Professional Development Hours, Lunch and Coffee Breaks.

Hong Kong Academy
33 Wai Man Rd, Sai Kung, Hong Kong
Tel: +852 2655 1111

Presenters

Kath Murdoch

Kath Murdoch is an experienced teacher, author, university lecturer and popular consultant who has worked for many years in schools throughout the world. With a focus on early childhood and primary education, she is widely respected as a leader in the field of inquiry based learning and integrative curriculum in which she has taught, researched and published for over 30 years.

Kath began her professional life as a classroom teacher in Melbourne, Australia. Her fascination in how students' constructed their understandings - and her interest in the way questions and big ideas could drive curriculum soon led to a passion for integrative and inquiry based methodologies. This passion has become a career-long focus for teaching, research and writing and the methodologies in which Kath specialises are now central to curriculum frameworks in many parts of the world - including the popular International Baccalaureate, PYP program.

Critical to Kath's success is her continued involvement in classroom teaching. Whether it is to demonstrate techniques, coach teachers or build her own repertoire of practices, Kath is committed to regular and ongoing work with students. Her classroom work and research feeds a dynamic and ever-evolving expertise in the area of integrative and inquiry-based learning.

Kath's professional development offerings are diverse. They range from intensive partnerships with schools to develop inquiry programs and practices over several years through to one-day workshops for beginning or experienced inquiry teachers. Whether in her home town of Melbourne or on the other side of the world, working with a team or speaking to a packed auditorium Kath's style is refreshingly practical, inclusive and always connected to the real world of teaching.

Trevor MacKenzie

Trevor MacKenzie is a part-time high school teacher in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. His research, consultancy, and authorship have reached all parts of the world as he works with schools, districts, organizations, and ministries/departments of education in a variety of contexts. Policy advising, curriculum development, professional development, and systems change are Trevor’s areas of expertise. His three publications are globally recognized as “must reads” in the inquiry-based school of thinking. He is a highly regarded speaker known for his heartfelt storytelling, kind demeanor, and person-first philosophy.

Trevor’s graduate research focused on identifying and removing the barriers to implementing inquiry-based learning in the K-12 setting. He has four publications: Dive into Inquiry; Inquiry Mindset Elementary Edition; Inquiry Mindset Assessment Edition; and Inquiry Mindset Questions Edition all published by Elevate Books Edu. He has vast experience supporting schools across several years in implementation strategies in public schools, international schools, and International Baccalaureate programmes (PYP/MYP/DP).

Mark Church

Mark Church works with schools throughout the world interested in developing and deepening cultures of thinking in their classrooms. He is quite interested in where educators find a lot of power and agency for their teaching when making their students’ thinking visible, giving it great value, and using student thinking to create ongoing learning opportunities.

Mark has been a longtime collaborator and consultant with Harvard Project Zero’s Making Thinking Visible and Cultures of Thinking initiatives worldwide, drawing upon his own classroom teaching experience and from the perspectives he has gained working with educators near and far. Together with Ron Ritchhart, Mark co-authored Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners (Jossey-Bass, 2011) and the more recent book, The Power of Making Thinking Visible (Jossey-Bass, 2020).

Alice Jungclaus

Born in Canada, Alice is a parent, teacher, Vice-Principal and global learner of Nêhiyaw (Cree) and Igbo ancestry. She has taught in public, private and international schools in Canada, Hong Kong, Japan and Switzerland. Alice believes in emboldening and inspiring learners to continually spark their curiosity through hopeful, challenging inquiry and action so that, together, we can positively transform our world.

Alice holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in French linguistics, a Bachelor of Education degree specializing in elementary education with a concentration in French as a second language, and a Master of Educational Administration and Leadership. She has 15 years of experience teaching within the International Baccalaureate Primary and Middle Years Programmes and over 10 years experience teaching provincial, state and city-state curricula. Alice is also a PCI® Certified Parent Coach who has completed the Parent Coach Certification®.

She currently learns alongside students and teachers using inquiry as a course of action towards reaching potential. As an intentional condition for learners, Alice works from an appreciative stance to develop concrete strategies that help achieve a sense of community and connection.

Most importantly, Alice is a curious and caring world citizen and committed lifelong learner. Her past, present and future is rooted in imagination, so she understands the importance of successfully engaging in inquiry approaches that promote a thirst for learning so that all students can be successful.