Pop the Question

I did not think I could transition to full inquiry AND meet the requirements of the curriculum UNTIL I realized constructivism must guide my inquiry.  I have always used hands on activities in my classroom, but when chemistry became a tested subject I found myself wanting to give more and more direct instruction.  I wanted to make sure I covered the material, and consequently I found myself losing the interest of more and more students.  After much reflection, I realized the students needed their learning to be authentic, but I still wondered how to do that and teach all the required skills.  Have you pondered the same question?

How does inquiry work?  Has my paradigm shifted enough?  Learning to Pop the Question…

My Inquiry Evolution: 

First, my work with the South Mississippi Writing Project (SMWP) has given me a model of inquiry and constructivist learning to help me guide students the way a tour guide efficiently leads a foreigner to make sure they do not miss the best sights.  In this model, the teacher uses carefully chosen strategies and materials to strategically guide students to the places that allow them to make discoveries and construct their own learning along the way.  Much reading, writing, sharing, reflecting, and revising is done along the way.

Second, my recent experience with Project Based Learning (PBL) taught me that I can hold the role of a performing arts master teacher who is responsible for teaching techniques to my students, requiring them to practice and expecting them to pass performance tests to prove their acquisition of skills.  From PBL I also learned the importance of student generated questions in authentic learning.  Students determine the “Need to Know” questions based on the task at hand.  From PBL, I also learned about metacognition.  I had been using metacognition with the SMWP, but I did not really grasp its greatness until I saw it in the PBL workshop. 

Finally, my views were shaped by ACT Quality Core Training.  It taught me rigor can be accomplished and encouraged through the powerful strategies that require writing to learn.

The summation of my experiences leads me to understand that teachers know things the students don’t know, and as we use authentic situations to teach through inquiry, we must help set the stage and ensure students learn the proper techniques without missing the best sights along the way.  In order for students to construct their own learning, teachers must actively construct a path of learning for them to follow and embed opportunities to experiment and write throughout the journey. 

Dance to Your Own Music… NOT

Inquiry, which I am going to dub “teacher influenced student inquiry”, is different from free discovery learning.  The students are not really free to dance to their own music as discovery learning may suggest, because that is unrealistic in most science classes like chemistry.  Imagine students being allowed to flit with and possibly mix two incompatible chemicals!  Therefore, the use of constructivism and metacognition by the masterful choreographer (teacher) is the key to making inquiry work.  Like a beautiful performance on the stage, inquiry has the power to inspire awe in beholder.  The enjoyment brought to the stage by a performance is not only the result of technical classes (direct instruction), rehearsals (student practice), corrections and revisions, but also that of cooperation and most importantly the culmination of the vision and encouragement of the choreographer (teacher) mixed with hours of work behind the scenes that others never see. 

Popping the Question

How in the world do teachers fully implement an inquiry classroom, and complete the required curriculum with the depth of knowledge required for standardized testing?  The answer is a well-choreographed classroom where the teacher knows how to pop the question.  Just as music influences the style of dance one chooses to exude, well prepared teacher prompts can influence and spur seemingly improvisational student questions in a subject area.  Prompts that lead to student questions and authentic learning include, but are not limited to, discrepant event demonstrations, projects to tackle, challenge based learning and problems to solve.  These invitations to student initiated inquiry will allow the magic of the dance in your subject area to take place as students learn, practice and prepare in your classroom so that they can shine on the public stage when they perform on standardized test or present their findings to the public. 

Invitation to the Dance

Successful inquiry, inquiry that leads to deep understanding, is a hands-on journey which is stealthily constructed and skillfully guided by the teacher to sway the movement of the students.  I invite you to join me in the dance of inquiry this year.  What skills will you teach together through inquiry?  How will you help your students generate useful and meaningful questions that will teach your curriculum as they construct meaning for themselves?

  

For more information visit these websites...

Project Based Learning (PBL) Buck Institute for Education www.bie.org
www.edutopia.org

Challenge Based Learning (CBL) www.ali.apple.com  
http://www.challengebasedlearning.org 
Problem Based Learning in Science   www.udel.edu 
Active Physics ppt example
ACT Quality Core  www.act.org

SMWP http://www.usm.edu/south-mississippi-writing-project

NWP www.nwp.org

I Was a Horse With Inquiry Blinders

What is inquiry in the science classroom, and should labs be part of science education?  Wow, could someone dare to suggest that labs have no place in the science classroom?  Well, it depends on the purpose of science education.  What do you think the purpose of a pre-college science class is?  Is it to learn about scientific facts; is it to make students aware of social crisis and issues that are scientifically influenced; or is it to teach students to be scientists?  The argument could be made that the students are there to learn science, not to be scientists.

In our consideration of inquiry in the science classroom we would do well to pause and consider the above questions, and determine if a science classroom can and should address all the above questions.  Whatever our conclusion, students need to be guided to knowledge through inquiry. 

In the National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) Position Statement on Scientific Inquiry, they state that the National Science Education Standards (NSES) define scientific inquiry as “the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and propose explanations based on the evidence derived from their work.  Scientific inquiry also refers to the activities through which students develop knowledge and understanding of scientific ideas, as well as an understanding of how scientists study the natural world.”  It is NSTA’s stance that understanding science content is significantly enhanced when ideas are anchored to inquiry experiences.

In the last sentence, could the word inquiry be replaced by the word lab?  I used to think so.  I changed traditional labs so that the students wrote the procedures to answer the lab question, or so that they figured out how to test a second or third sample after walking through an example lab.  Wasn’t this inquiry?  Weren’t they answering questions and figuring out things on their own?  Why was I getting such poor results?  Why was there a lack of evidence for deep understanding?  The answer: I was a horse wearing inquiry blinders, a puzzle missing a couple of pieces, a performance with dance after dance and no step weaving them together.

When talking with a language arts colleague, she stated that scientific inquiry was different than inquiry in her classes.  Reflection on her statement, my research and time spent with the South Mississippi Writing Project leads me to think that scientific inquiry is often so focused on the student as a scientist, that we fail to successfully use inquiry for the acquisition of scientific content.  As stated above, so often my students finished our inquiry project or activity without being able to show evidence of deep understanding.  They do the lab but cannot explain the results.  I am coming to understand that effective science inquiry involves the weaving of inquiry activities (labs) and inquiry learning (academic activities including guided student research), which are best executed through the mindset of constructivism.  Constructivism is a learning theory suggesting that through processes of accommodation and assimilation, individuals construct new knowledge from their experiences.  Along with constructivism (the teacher’s careful construction of opportunities for students to create specific knowledge), opportunities for metacognition are important in achieving deep understanding.  Metacognition is the awareness and regulation of one’s own learning process.  I believe metacognition is where writing will play a key role in enhancing deeper understanding in my science classroom.  As I have observed in language arts classrooms, inquiry encompasses teacher guidance that leads the student to construct meaning and knowledge.  My new working definition of inquiry reads like this: the teacher’s role in scientific inquiry is to lead students down a specific path that will allow for the construction of knowledge as they resolve their questions (which were planted by me) through research, collaboration, thought, writing and experimentation.  See the next blog for ideas about planting questions to sway the dance of your classroom.

An inquiry based approach is most effective when it is carefully designed and structured by teachers.  It was with the understanding that inquiry is an approach, otherwise thought of as a way of thinking, an environment or culture of the classroom, that I found the missing piece of my inquiry puzzle, the blinders I’d been wearing, the missing step in my dance!  I was offering inquiry activities to my students, but not really an inquiry environment with a constructivist mindset and time for metacognition.  Think about it, science teachers are charged with teaching students to be scientist AND with teaching scientific facts.  This lofty request cannot be realized through haphazard teaching consisting of poorly linked lectures, practice sets, strategies and labs, but is possible through the carefully choreographed science classroom where inquiry in its broadest sense leads the way.

For more Information I recommend the following:

Book:
Teaching High School Science Through Inquiry by Douglas Llewellyn, NSTA Press, 2005

Web Article: 
National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) Position Statement on Scientific Inquiry, http://www.nsta.org/docs/PositionStatement_ScientificInquiry.pdf     

Websites:
http://www.teachinquiry.com/index/Introduction.html
www.galileo.org