Week 7--Reflections on Inquiry-What Have I learned?

I learned that Inquiry is a student-centered process for learning in which the teacher acts more as a facilitator or guide. 

I learned the importance of establishing a sense of community in an Inquiry based classroom.  I need to develop a community where students feel their ideas are valued and where they feel inspired to take safe learning risks.

I learned about the Abilities Necessary to Do Inquiry, which are the abilities that students need to have developed, or need to be working to develop, in order to learn from Inquiry.  These abilities include: Identifying questions that can be answered through investigations, Designing and conducting an investigation, Using appropriate tools and techniques to gather, analyze, and interpret data, Developing descriptions, explanations, predictions, and models using evidence, Thinking critically and logically to make relationships between evidence and explanations, Recognizing and analyzing alternative explanations and predictions, and Communicating procedures and explanations.

I also learned the Understandings About Inquiry.   After learning what Inquiry really is, these Understandings seemed sort of like, “Well of course these are the understanding about inquiry.” They were not as much of a surprise or an “Aha!”

The Understandings about Inquiry are:    

• Different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of investigations. 
• Current knowledge and understanding guide investigations.
• Technology used to gather data enhances accuracy and allows us to analyze and quantify results of investigations.
• Explanations emphasize evidence, have logically consistent arguments, and use principles, models, and theories.
• New knowledge advances through legitimate skepticism.
• Investigations sometimes result in new ideas and phenomena for study, generate new methods or procedures for an investigation, or develop new technologies.

I think that it is this last Understanding that scared me the most about Inquiry.  I want my students to be curious and I want them to be interested in whatever we are learning, but like most teachers, while I want my students to have new ideas that lead to new investigations, I am mandated to teach a curriculum and skill set.  I worry that the new ideas and phenomena generated for study will take on a life of their own, and that we will get off track.  While I know my students will learn even if they are following a different set of rails, I still have a responsibility to teach the curriculum and grade level standards.

In addition to the abilities and understanding associated with Inquiry, I also learned that the process skills for Inquiry based learning are observing, questioning, planning and investigating, formulating explanations, making predictions, analyzing data, and communicating.  These process skills are skills that business leaders and higher education have determined most important for student success after high school.  These process skills connect with the 5 Essential Features of Classroom Inquiry:

• The learner engages in questions that can be investigated.
• The learner gives priority to evidence in responding to questions.
• The learner formulates explanations from evidence.
• The learner connects explanations to knowledge.
• The learner communicates and justifies explanations.

While all of these features do not need to be present in every lesson, if not one of them is addressed, then the lesson would not be inquiry based.

This class also challenged my understanding about facts and concepts.  I had no idea that I would have such a difficult time sorting through a list of concepts and facts.  One realization is that with knowledge and practical experience, some concepts seem to evolve into facts.  What was a concept for a first grader is now just a fact for the 10^th grader. For myself, I focused on facts being concrete pieces of information, and concepts being big and more abstract ideas.  A very practical experience in this course on Inquiry involved determining investigable and non-investigable questions, and also learning how to change a non-investigable question to an investigable question.  This was vey helpful to me as I work to improve my questioning strategies so that I can encourage my students to have a deeper engagement in their learning.

One of the most helpful aspects of this class was the lesson ideas and Web 2.0 tools shared by my classmates.  It is helpful to hear new ways to use the old familiar tools, and also exciting to have some new tools that have already been test-driven to try in my own classroom. 

In addition to exploring how Web 2.0 tools can be integrated into an inquiry classroom, I learned about the 5E Inquiry Instructional Planning Model.  I have been using backward design for planning, and the 5E’s (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate) model was easy to incorporate into my existing plan.  Just as in backward design, the evaluation part of the 5Es is ongoing.  While I prefer a linear format, the purpose of the 5E continuous flow graphic was to help us see the cyclic nature of the inquiry process, and to remind us of our responsibility to continually formatively assess throughout a learning unit.  If formative assessment is ongoing, there are few surprises on a summative assessment, because teachers will have already responded to the misconceptions and misunderstandings.

Before this course I believed that Inquiry looked more like the student centered/open inquiry end of the Inquiry continuum, and I was not sure how I could implement something that I imagined to be so freewheeling with my students who have such significant emotional and behavioral disabilities.  I was relieved to learn that Inquiry IS on a continuum, and that while my lessons may need to fall somewhere between teacher centered/structured inquiry and guided inquiry most of the time, I can still use inquiry in my classroom.  Using the 5E Instructional Model and attending to the essential features of Inquiry, I believe that I can design inquiry based lessons that help my students to develop those process skills that are integral to their future success.   

And since I believe in diving in, tomorrow I will be starting the unit on particle movement in matter that I developed during this course.  Hopefully it will be a positive learning experience for my students, and also for me!