Inquiry

Student participation in their learning starts with instilling a sense of wonder and curiosity for their own learning. This does not always come easily as students progress through formal schooling. Privileging student voice in the process of their own learning is critical. Questions we will investigate include: How can you successfully transition to a more inquiry based approach? What school systems and structures support this type of approach, which ones do not? What results from this approach? Join me in a discussion of the overall strategy and a specific conversation about how to systemically support teachers in this work. School and district based examples will be plentiful.

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.

Create/Complicate

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 you (0r one of your teachers... or you are creating for profdev) 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

Scaffolding Curiosity Example

Watch this -

Ask students for general observations.
Watch again and ask them to focus on a particular region of the country and repeat the observations.

Introduce them to this tool - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/15/us/politics/swing-history.html

You can go a number of ways from here -

Students can again do general observations.
You could have students look at a particular election.
You could also have students watch a particular state over time.
They could be watching for trends, anomalies, you could ask them to come up with which state was most consistent, least.

After all this observing and analyzing, ask them what questions they have about these trends and patterns and presidential elections.

Possible continuation of the inquiry - have students sample examples from The Living Room Candidate - http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/

Students are to look at a particular election year, reference the graphic and start to make some connections about what was happening at that time. Students would then (either) create a new campaign ad for the current candidates in the 'old' style or create a new campaign ad for an old candidate in the new style. You could give them the charge of appealing to a particular swing state... now or then. This can all move in the direction of having them assess their own issue preferences, what they are concerned with and how that compared in history to other times.

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