We spoke at the Oakland County Effective Practices conference recently on inquiry teaching methods. The focus of our session was to help teachers find practical ways to include inquiry in their lessons. Our session had a small but diverse group of teachers – high school, elementary and a central office administrator that “represented all grade levels”. The highlight of the day occurred at the end of the session when we were discussing things that could be taken back to each teacher’s individual classroom.
Every teacher easily identified something that excited them – table tents with question stems and statement stems to facilitate student discourse, templates that students could use during a gallery walk to help them focus on their observations and finally, how effective modeling was at increasing student understanding of the concepts.
The reflection that was the best for me came from the administrator. He was truly amazed that we had modeled how a single phenomena on chemical reactions could be used with students at all ages (elementary to high school), developed by the teacher to address the depth of learning that was required at their level. The fact that all the teachers at the various levels took something valuable away illustrated that when inquiry based learning and differentiation are used together it can be magical!
Through a series of blog posts practical suggestions will be introduced for how to effectively implement inquiry into your lessons. Simple things like table tents with question and statement stems help students with their discourse and argumentation techniques.
Student modeling of the phenomena allows the teacher to see into the minds of their students and gather information on where students are in their understanding of the concept.
Open-ended questioning techniques give teachers the ability to guide student learning toward the intended outcomes without giving students the answers. Targeted use of questions is an excellent way to differentiate learning among students that are at different levels within the classroom.
Our next blog post on inquiry will track the development of inquiry as a tool to facilitate student understanding of science concepts and delving into how hands on learning is being transformed into minds on learning easily transferred by the student to new and unknown topics.