It seems like yesterday, but it was actually over 30-years ago at the start of my teaching career that I learned about a new way to teach science to students – Inquiry Based Learning. I was so excited! No more reading and answering questions in science classes. No more handing students recipes to follow and calling them “labs” where students were graded on whether they had the “correct” data. Students were to be taught how to be a scientist instead of memorizing facts! It was an exciting time to be a new teacher!
As a young teacher I wanted to try out all these new methods of inquiry teaching. I thought that all teachers would be excited to be doing science with kids in the classroom. I was definitely naive! Teachers (like everyone else) were creatures of habit and based their assignment choices on how they had learned. What was effective for their learning as a student became the model for their teaching. In an age where success was measured by content regurgitation onto a test, inquiry based activities did not get through information fast enough to demonstrate successful learning.
Curriculums and textbooks reinforced content memorization by being written so that inquiry was something students learned independent of the scientific content. While the intent was to weave content and inquiry skills together, the textbooks that were used placed the inquiry skills in the first chapter and called it “The Scientific Method”. Once the class moved on to Chapter 2 the focus shifted to memorizing information. Elementary school was worse. The first chapter did not even focus on the scientific method.
I hit the ground running, wanting my students to experience the joy of being in a laboratory and doing “real” science. Spreading this new method of teaching was the goal but I soon ran into a wall based on misconceptions of what inquiry based learning was. Thirty years later, after building inquiry based learning programs in my classroom, with each curriculum change, I would sit in departmental meetings where misconceptions (see figure above) resulted in constant arguments that there was no way to use inquiry based learning effectively in the classroom. The argument was that it was impossible to get all the required curriculum for students to be successful at the next level because of time constraints if a teacher used inquiry based learning.
Students learn science best when they are allowed to question and investigate the phenomena that surround them. Research into student learning supports the idea that learning by memorization is not productive. In future blog posts we are going to be diving into effective practices on using Inquiry Based Learning in the classroom and offering practical ways to help teachers move from directing activities to facilitating inquiry with their students.