Teacher Inquiry Cycle Designer Agent Skill

Design a practitioner inquiry cycle from research question through data collection to evidence-informed action.

Context cost
5.1k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 20.3 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Design a practitioner inquiry cycle from research question through data collection to evidence-informed action. Use when starting action research, teacher-led investigation, or professional inquiry.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

action-researchdata-informeddocumentationinquirypractitioner-researchprofessional-learningresearchtimperley

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md20.3 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "professional-learning/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer" skill_name: "Teacher Inquiry Cycle Designer" domain: "professional-learning" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "strong" evidence_sources: - "Timperley (2011) — Realizing the Power of Professional Learning" - "Timperley et al. (2007) — Teacher Professional Learning and Development: Best Evidence Synthesis" - "Cochran-Smith & Lytle (2009) — Inquiry as Stance: practitioner research for the next generation" - "Dana & Yendol-Hoppey (2014) — The Reflective Educator's Guide to Classroom Research" - "Earl & Katz (2006) — Leading Schools in a Data-Rich World" input_schema: required: - field: "inquiry_question" type: "string" - field: "teacher_context" type: "string" optional: - field: "student_level" type: "string" - field: "available_time" type: "string" - field: "data_available" type: "string" - field: "collaboration" type: "string" - field: "school_support" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "inquiry_design" type: "object" - field: "data_plan" type: "object" - field: "analysis_framework" type: "object" - field: "sharing_plan" type: "string" chains_well_with: - "reflective-practice-prompt-generator" - "lesson-study-cycle-designer" - "instructional-coaching-conversation-guide" - "professional-development-session-designer" - "pedagogical-content-knowledge-developer" - "technological-pedagogical-content-knowledge-developer" teacher_time: "4 minutes" tags: ["inquiry", "Timperley", "practitioner-research", "action-research", "data-informed", "professional-learning"] ---
72# Teacher Inquiry Cycle Designer
73
74## What This Skill Does
75
76Designs a structured teacher inquiry cycle — a form of practitioner research where a teacher investigates a specific question about their practice and its impact on student learning, collects evidence, analyses what they find, and draws conclusions that inform their future teaching. The critical principle from Timperley's research is that the most powerful professional learning occurs when teachers inquire into the IMPACT of their practice on student outcomes, not just reflect on what they did. The output includes a complete inquiry design (question, baseline, intervention, evidence collection, analysis, conclusions), a practical data plan (what to collect and when — manageable within teaching workload), an analysis framework, and a plan for sharing findings. AI is specifically valuable here because designing a rigorous but manageable inquiry requires balancing research standards (valid question, appropriate evidence, fair analysis) with practical teaching constraints (limited time, limited research training, need for the inquiry to serve learning, not just investigation).
77
78## Evidence Foundation
79
80Timperley (2011) placed teacher inquiry at the centre of effective professional learning, arguing that the most powerful professional learning cycle is: identify a student learning need → identify what the teacher needs to learn → engage in professional learning → apply it in practice → assess the impact on students → refine. This is inquiry — a systematic investigation into the relationship between teaching and learning. Timperley et al. (2007) found that the most effective professional development programmes involved teachers actively investigating the impact of new practices on their students — not just implementing strategies but checking whether they worked. Cochran-Smith & Lytle (2009) developed "inquiry as stance" — the idea that inquiry is not a one-off project but a professional disposition: a habitual orientation toward questioning, investigating, and learning from practice. Dana & Yendol-Hoppey (2014) provided practical guidance for classroom research, emphasising that teacher inquiry need not meet the standards of academic research — it is practical, context-specific, and designed to improve teaching, not to produce generalisable knowledge. Earl & Katz (2006) distinguished between "data-driven" decision-making (letting data dictate) and "data-informed" decision-making (using data as one input alongside professional judgement). Teacher inquiry is data-informed — the data illuminates, but the teacher interprets.
81
82## Input Schema
83
84The teacher must provide:
85- **Inquiry question:** What they want to investigate. *e.g. "Does using retrieval practice at the start of every lesson improve my Year 9 students' retention of key Science vocabulary?" / "What happens to student participation when I replace 'hands up' with cold-calling?" / "How does providing written success criteria affect the quality of my Year 7 students' creative writing?"*
86- **Teacher context:** Their situation. *e.g. "Year 9 Science, 5 years' experience, interested in memory and retention" / "NQT, Year 7 English, struggling with uneven participation"*
87
88Optional (injected by context engine if available):
89- **Student level:** Year group
90- **Available time:** Duration of inquiry
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md2,896 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈790
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
4,285
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
2.5%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 25% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

5.1k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 20.3 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md20.3 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Teacher Inquiry Cycle Designer · 5.1k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer ] || { mv .claude/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/teacher-inquiry-cycle-designer

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

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