INQUIRY LEARNING | PAKIREHUA

Our Curriculum supports an inquiry based learning approach that encourages students to be actively involved in the learning process, and which also aligns to the NZ Curriculum’s vision of allowing students to learn through addressing real-life issues. Teachers at Ruakākā School have recently undergone professional development in the area of inquiry learning. We have developed some key understandings that support us in facilitating an inquiry based approach:

• We aim to frame inquiries around provocative, essential questions rather than closed ‘topics’ and select content that will give students something worth thinking about 

• We ensure inquiries are designed with sufficient points of reference or relevance to the real lives of our tamariki

• We consider the ‘kind of thinking’ that students will most often need to be doing as they move into the inquiry and ensure that we teach the appropriate skills they will need

• We spend time ‘tuning in’ to students’ thinking early in an inquiry

• We use students’ own questions

• We make thinking explicit by talking about it and modelling it

At Ruakākā, teachers use the following Inquiry Cycle to support and guide our thinking and practice, and to help in giving students a way of thinking and talking about their own inquiry journeys.

INQUIRY LEARNING | PAKIREHUA

To support inquiry learning and teaching, we have developed some key understandings about the four phases within our School Inquiry cycle, including a ‘Framing the Inquiry’ stage, that aim to clarify what each phase is about, and what we expect teachers and students to be doing at each phase.

COMMUNITY PROBLEM SOLVING

This approach has been used as an authentic problem solving process - community problem solving resources are found here.  Firstly, brainstorm with the students possible challenges and from there develop possible solutions. The next step involves generating a criteria and then ranking the solutions to create an action plan. 

This process really has been the basis for the Ocean Sea Week competition when we won the National prize for the dog poo posters and worked with the Whangarei District Council to print and install the posters around the beaches in Bream Bay.  It was also used for the Passion Time projects completed by Room 1 students and the Quilt for a family at Nelson Park school. The process is the same althouigh the pace, product and environment are all different.

This follows a June Maker model of differentiation in action.  The exciting thing about this is that you never know where the students will take it and what the outcome will be.