Key Ideas

We firmly believe that implementing personal digital inquiry experiences requires purposefully building a culture of inquiry in your learning community. Our PDI framework is designed to help visualize and plan for regular opportunities for four core sets of practices as part of personal digital inquiry before you implement these experiences with children. These four core sets of practices include:

• Wonder & Discover: All learners have opportunities to engage with content and experiences that prompts their own questions about a topic and time to explore resources and discover new ideas about the world around them.
• Collaborate & Discuss: All learners have opportunities to engage in joint conversations around shared interests, discuss interpretations, make connections, and negotiate differences in their thinking.
• Create & Take Action: All learners have opportunities to express their interests and new understandings through creative work designed to start conversations, raise awareness, take action, or change minds in their learning community or beyond.
• Analyze & Reflect: All learners have opportunities to analyze content in order to build their understanding of challenging information and reflect on their choices and what they’ve learned at multiple points (e.g., before, during, and after) of their inquiry process.

In the chapters to come, we explore these opportunities more fully with stories from various K-5 settings.