What are some of the biggest challenges teachers have putting inquiry into the formal classroom?
Teachers have told us over the years that putting inquiry into the classroom gives them a challenge in completing the required curriculum, which is often paced for memorization rather than investigation. Once that is overcome--and it can be! (See the tip related to this question.)-- teachers sometimes struggle with giving the students the freedom to lead their own learning process. Many steps can be taken in that process, so it doesn't have to be sudden or shocking!
What advice do you have to help me give control of the learning process over to the students more?
Here are some self-reflection questions to consider:
- Am I doing something for my students that they should be doing for themselves?
- Am I pre-determining what’s possible for my students to achieve?
- When I foresee a barrier, am I bringing it to the students?
- Am I staying in the moment and holding true to the expectations of the step that we are in?
- Am I thinking about how to improve the process?
- Am I comfortable saying "I don't know?”
- Am I waiting for all the students to speak before I speak?
- Am I contributing knowledge or resources I have when students ask for them?
- Have I reviewed the tenets (see above) recently?
What are the fundamental tenets of Make it Matter?
- Success: when participants own the project and believe that if they want to make change, they can. (Outcomes are not judged as successes or failures. They are solely sources for lessons learned.)
- Everything is an experiment. Everyone is thinking about how to improve the process.
- There are no predetermined outcomes. Keep your mind open at each step, not deciding ahead of time what the next decision will be.
- (For teams) No one person is solely responsible for solving challenges and overcoming barriers that might arise. All challenges and barriers are brought to the whole group.
- (For teams) All voices are heard. Every participant speaks and is respected at every meeting.
What are some words I could use to introduce my students to inquiry?
Team, we are going to be doing something different! We’re going to launch a project that impacts our community and addresses something that matters to you personally. And you’re going to be making 100% of the decisions through this process! My role is to help you take each step, but what we do is completely up to you all. You’ll be great at this. Here’s why.
- You each have amazing strengths and talents.
- You each have something valuable to contribute to the world.
- Each and every one of you has the ability to tackle an issue and make a positive difference in the world.
A lot of the time classrooms today are about learning specific pieces of knowledge that you’ve been told you need to know. There’s not a lot of personal ownership in that process. Here, we want to change that around. We’re practicing for real life. You each are going to have control over what goal you work towards and what you learn.
What's a way to get going in inquiry, to give a little taste?
Start with a question/issue you, as the leader, give and have the learners do a 15-minute piece of research on the internet, report out, and identify some themes/ideas that seem to come out.
Discuss the next question/step one might want to explore.
What is meant by metacognition in inquiry learning?
Metacognition is thinking about thinking. In learning, we need to think about how we are learning, not just what we are learning.
If you learn how, then you can be expert learners and problem-solvers for the rest of your lives, no matter what challenges are facing you.
Because we are going to have so many new sources of information and opinions, it’s also important to realize we have to think hard about the information we’re given. We’ll be asking questions like:
- How do I know this answer is right?
- And could people have different answers to this same one question?
- And could my answer to this question change as I learn more about the situation?
One of the other realities of learning is that you often don’t answer questions completely. Sometimes you can only find partial answers. This means we are going to care about progress in learning. Struggling forward a tiny bit at a time is progress! Not being able to find an answer on the first try, or getting something wrong doesn't mean failure! Failure only happens by stopping. Every tiny step of doing, trying, retrying, scrapping, and trying something else is success: it’s progress!
What are some good books about inquiry learning?
From Inquiry to Action: Civic Engagement with Project-Based Learning in All Content Areas, Steven Zemelman (Heineann, 2016)
