What does it mean to develop a culture of inquiry?
I love learning about space! One of my favorite childhood memories is playing with the other kids in my neighborhood and taking them to Space Camp. Well, not the real Space Camp, MY Space Camp! It all stemmed from watching a movie called Space Camp. How I loved this movie about kids and an astronaut attending Space Camp. As a reward of their hard training at camp, they got the opportunity to sit inside a shuttle to experience an engine test. With the help from an unusual friend, the engine malfunctions and sends the students and astronaut into space. Through many challenges they need to use their experiences of what they learned at Space Camp to return safely home. I watched this movie so much I could cite the lines along with the actors!
From there I wanted to go to Space Camp. I started by creating my own Space Camp at home. When I reflect how I constructed my own Space Camp it was through my imagination and an understanding of what I already knew and what I wanted to learn more about. From there I would ask my mother to take me to the local library so I could check out books on space, shuttles, NASA, constellations. I tried to create the most elaborate space experience I could offer in Southern Ohio to the kids in the neighborhood. I would have my friends over and attend Space Camp from my home. To this day, we still talk about that experience.
How did this experience become so meaningful to my friends and I? It all started with inquiry! It all started with a desire of wanting to know more about a topic or an experience. It started with me asking questions about a topic I knew little about except what I saw from a movie. As a teacher I continuously reflect upon how I could bring the “Space Camp Experience” into my classroom? I needed to create a culture of thinking and inquiry. An environment that would allow students to feel safe to share their thinking and explore their ideas through inquiry, not just once a week but everyday throughout all subject areas.
What is inquiry?
Inquiry-based learning is a student-centered learning process. Inquiry is students asking questions, searching for answers, and arriving to conclusions, leaving them to construct something new: an idea, an interpretation, or a product. (Buck Institute, 2012) Learners will identify a need for information and develop skills for finding, accessing, organizing, and using information to solve problems and create/ share new knowledge. (Asselin & Doiron, 2008)
Why is developing a culture of inquiry important to a classroom teacher?
● Teachers can learn more about student interests and learning styles
-When a teacher allows for students to explore their own interests and ask questions, you can learn a lot! Not only do you learn what your students are interested in, you can also see the strategies students will utilize to solve a problem or find information. This often lends itself to you observing learning styles of individual students, how they collaborate with others, and present information. You can evaluate if they have a skillset to persevere and rise to new challenges. By simply observing, the information obtained by the teacher on individual students is priceless and can help you when needing to differentiate learning experiences for your students.
● Students connect to the real world
-When appropriate, teachers can help students focus on community, state, national, and world issues. Having students ask questions about what’s happening outside of the classroom is just as important as asking questions to what is happening inside of the classroom. Inquiring about the world is an authentic way to connect with students about happenings outside of the classroom. As we develop life-long learners, inquiry allows students to bring their experiences outside of the classroom to inside the classroom.
● Checks the comprehension level of whole class and individual students
-Allowing students to ask questions on a given topic allows the teacher to gauge the level of understanding of their students. One could observe the type of questions as more surface level to evaluative type of questions. This observation would act as a formative assessment lending the teacher to see where student knowledge exists with a topic. This is valuable information for a teacher to differentiate the learning for students. This understanding allows them to set goals for individual students and/or plan learning objectives for the class.
● Engages students into the learning
-Inquiry engages students into learning objectives. Students become part of the process in which the content will be learned as they establish goals that will foster their understanding of a topic. Their questions along a subject matter will drive the instruction and how a teacher can connect it to content learning objectives such as reading, writing, and speaking and listening. It is the students collecting and analyzing of information that will help them answer their questions. All of the sudden, their need to acquire information becomes the driving force to wanting develop the necessary skills to achieve their own understanding of a subject matter.
● Students have a voice and choice
-Allowing all students to ask questions and teaching them how to have effective discussions whether it’s with a partner or whole group makes them feel like they have voice and their thoughts are valued.
-An important element of the workshop model is allowing students to have a choice during independent practice time. Inspiring students to explore strategies or topics of interests through reading, writing, experimenting with a new concept, or solving a math problem allows inquiry to flourish and challenges students to take their thinking to a new level.
● Challenges students to think deeply around topics of interest to themselves and others
-When inquiry is evident within a classroom, it moves children to deeper levels of understanding of a topic. One would observe a student from being curious to actively learning ways to achieve an understanding of their interest. Many times as students think more deeply about a topic they start to notice the connection to other subjects and begin to inquire on other subject matters. Students will also witness how others in the classroom take to asking and answering questions and will learn from their peers’ new ways to think about a topic. This will enhance an understanding of the different perspectives of learning and broaden their range to solve problems or obtain information.
● Improves student learning outcomes
-When teacher and student inquiry are combined, a community of high learning is developed. When teacher inquiry is evident it allows for us to adjust to the needs of our students on a daily basis and therefore will allow us to better meet the individual needs of our students and helping students reach their learning goals. When students engage is asking questions, they continue to broaden their thinking and problem solving skills and therefore allows them multiple ways to obtain information and/or solve problems which will always foster lifelong learning.
What does an inquiry-based classroom look like?
● Students taking risks to share their thinking with a safe environment
-Teachers take on this profession because we want to teach children. Getting to know you students’ interests and learning styles provide your children with the sense that your care about them and it sends a message that you want to help them achieve learning goals. When allowing students to ask questions on a given topic, do not judge their questions. Celebrate their successes and celebrate their failures as they lead to new information and new questions. Establishing a culture that allows students to feel safe with their thoughts is critical when nurturing inquiry-based learning. Building upon knowledge learned from Habits of Mind will help teachers establish this type of environment. In doing so, students will be willing to take risks and move their thinking a little more deeply by collaborating with their peers.
● Teacher and students asking questions
-Teach students how to ask questions. This allows students to do more of the work around curriculum than the teacher. They will become invested in wanting to set goals that will help them find the answers to their questions.
-Teachers can ask questions based off of curriculum by simply asking students what they already know about a topic and what students want to learn about a particular topic. This invites students to ask questions around curriculum topics, therefore, engaging them in the curriculum learning needed to be provided through state standards.
● Teacher and students having collaborative discussions
-Discussions improve student thinking around a topic by hearing different point of views on the learning, how others are figuring things out, and what they are learning about their own thinking. Students also learn how to listen to others and respond through conversation.
-What an excellent time to establish routines and expectations through the speaking and listening standards.
● Exploration of topics based on student and teacher interest
-Obviously educators have to teach to state mandated standards and must learn how to ask open-ended questions that will challenge student thinking and scaffold their curiosity to inquiry and wonder.
-It’s also important to allow students ask questions to topics of interest. In addition to learning more about your students, this will foster student engagement and their willingness to work on new inquiry skillsets that could be applied to more curriculum driven standards a teacher needs to meet.
● The teacher is not the center of attention
-Plan for partner, whole or small group student-centered discussions where the teacher is not at the front of the room providing information to their students. Facilitate conversation where students are the key contributors by providing their background knowledge and wonders and calling upon their peers for feedback to carry on the learning. Encourage students to express their own thoughts, listen to each other, and converse with one another directly by asking questions and responding. The teacher never gives an answer to the class, but may continue to guide more in-depth conversation on a topic by asking open-ended questions that invite multiple responses or asking students to expand on their thinking.
How Do I Develop a Culture of Inquiry?
After establishing a safe environment where students are comfortable to take risks by sharing their thinking and wonders, it all begins with asking questions. Gather a multitude of student generated questions and students will begin to see the questions to that will help them obtain information to understand a subject matter. Whether the questions are teacher or student driven, it is a skillset that all participants in the classroom need to learn how to ask effective questions. Asking open-ended questions will drive students to a learning goal is key such as: How could we find out? What do you think could happen next? Is the answer correct and explain your thinking? Could this of happened in….? What do you see as other possible outcomes?
Allowing conversations to be more student driven and not always teacher driven. Flexibility is the key! When working with other teachers who wish to bring more inquiry-based learning into their classroom, I find it’s difficult for them to allow the students to drive their own learning. When teachers want to dictate the amount of content presented to the class it can prohibit the students from extending their thinking due to questions they may have had answered by the teacher with no discussion or active engagement on the part of the class. In contrast, if the teacher allows for the conversation to be all student-driven sometimes the students do not have enough background knowledge on a topic to allow the conversation get deep enough to challenge students’ thinking. Therefore, it’s important for the teacher to have ready some questions that will guide and energize the conversation so the necessary depth of content meets the teacher’s learning objective.
How can I encourage students to start asking questions in my classroom?
● It’s all about creating that safe environment for them to take risks. Asking questions can be scary for students. They fear the message they are sending is, “I don’t know and understand what we are talking about. What will others think about my questions?” The only way to get over this mentality is for you to model all the time across your day how you ask questions, even if you know the answer. This will begin to create the safe environment that your students will take a risk to ask questions. Celebrate the questions they are asking no matter what level of question they are asking.
● When beginning new learning on a topic, collect the class’ questions. Write down every question exactly as they ask it. DO NOT have any judgment or respond with an answer to any of their questions.
● Teach your students how to have a discussion where they engage their peers in conversation by asking questions to start talk and follow up questions to other’s answers from the group. You may need to begin by placing expectations or an agreed upon routine that allows all to participate within the discussion. Scaffold routine until students can become independent with having their own conversation with no perimeters.