Elementary Awesomeness: Channeling the Power of Inquiry
What is Inquiry?
Learning starts with curiosity
Intentionally builds experiences to honor student ideas, questions and wonderings.
Teacher creates space for student ideas, questions and wonderings to go grow utilizing a wide range of curricular materials (video, graphs, maps, images, etc).
Students do the heavy lifting of learning; requiring development of questioning and investigating skills.
When a school values inquiry, students become arbiters of their own learning experience.
How do you define inquiry?
What changes when you help students develop the skill of inquiry?
What is something you have taught in the last year that you can identify as something that can become more focused on student inquiry?
What is the role of the teacher in an inquiry driven classroom?
What are the barriers or apprehension related to working inquiry into your classroom environment?
How will this complicate the learner experience?
How will you mitigate those barriers, apprehension or complications?
What can change if your pedagogy becomes more inquiry-driven?
To/For... By/With
Extension - Focus on one of the units your are preparing...
How does your unit ask questions rather than state topics?
Brainstorm as many possible questions for this topic
Why will students want to learn more about this project/unit/lesson idea?
Brainstorm as many ways you might hook kids into asking more questions
Brainstorm all the ways kids might find this intriguing