Inquiry has at its foundation a constructivist theory, that humans construct new knowledge. A central component of this process is Piaget’s description of cognitive dissonance. Inquiry removes the information source from the deliverer, Teacher, to the inquirer, Student. When in pure lecture mode only so much of this can take place and learning suffers – I happen to like a good lecture, I am affected by auditory experiences and I love to talk, I end up turning lectures into discussions, i.e. Inquiry.

Too many people lack self-initiative, curiosity, motivation. For these folks such skills must be taught,unfortunately. This, to me, is the common ground of all Inquiry based learning; whether Teacher initiated or Student initiated, that is a choice for a particular day’s lesson. However, who generates the knowledge is of utmost importance to distinguishing lecture from discussion.

College teachers do not require even a single course in how to teach; to affect quality learning at that level surely is a matter of serendipity. However, this is changing in the UMass Amherst Electrical and Computer Engineering Program and undergraduate Physics program. Students are forced to invent, explain, and essentially own their learning.

Have you any new Inquiry insights this last year?

Thanks for the topic

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Inquiry learning will not work unless students are \’set up for success\’. It is student lead but teacher guided – I think that is crucially important.

This means huge amounts of forward planning on the teacher\’s part – although the student may be choosing the actual topic or part of the topic according to interest. Maybe the whole class is studying a topic or looking to solve a problem – they do a whole class brainstorm and categorise/ map the brainstorm (teacher models) then divide into groups according to the subtopic they choose and brainstorm again on their own following the teacher\’s model. Many of the skills can be practised in other areas – for example brainstorming can be practised when writing topics.

Helping children to develop into independent inquirers takes years and years and the skills needs to be practised all the years of schooling. Schools need to have a school wide plan for the development of these skills (information literacy skills including ICT and thinking skills). Some can be pre-taught, others taught just-in-time. The main point is that such skills are taught not caught.

Guided inquiry is a very good model to follow. As several have pointed out – giving students a topic and then a hand-in date is useless. Doing so puts us back to the \’project\’ days where the student had no idea of how to tackle the project and was not provided with the many necessary skills so -surprise, surprise – they either copied it all and added a pretty cover or had mum and dad do it all. What on earth did the student learn? Nothing at all – no content knowledge and no skills in how to carry out inquiry. Too often the teacher\’s jaundiced view of \’project work\’ is simply reinforced by the poor standard of the work handed in.

Guiding student to carry out inquiry or research takes much preplanning and effort on the part of the teacher but if that is done properly then once the process is underway the teacher really can act as a facilitator. The end product may be shared with others as a presentation like a speech, song, essay etc or/and it may recommend some form of action that is required or it may be the presentation of solutions to problems.

This really is life long learning – I often use the process myself – when writing an article, buying a house or new equipment, working out how to get neighbours to look at drainage etc etc.

This is learning to learn – students with such skills and experience shouldn\’t end up on Fair Go having been fleeced or conned. Instead they should know how to ask the right questions to reveal problems and then they should be able to solve the problems

The process also of course includes constant reflective evaluation. There are important times when the teacher perhaps needs to intervene to allow the student to move forward – setting the students up for success.

Part of the problem in many countries including New Zealand is that teachers don’t always realise this and are not teaching the skills in any kind of planned way. (See our Education Review Office report (2005) Student learning in the information landscape).This is particularly so at secondary level and so too many students lack the skills to progress as well as should do as tertiary level. Some countries have teacher librarians who are trained in inquiry learning and information literacy skills and can oversee this development across the school. I believe though that most teachers need some professional development in this area.

I frequently see wonderful, exciting inquiry work from new entrant students (5yrs) through to upper primary and high school students (not so many at high school unfortunately as too many teachers there lack the skills to lead students in worthwhile inquiry).

Rochelle: Thank you so much for this wonderful comment, Liz! I\’ve really been waiting to get a good answer to this question, and this is a fantastic one! I think my own wonderful experience with inquiry can be best classifed as \”guided inquiry\”, and yes, I absolutely see how it can be used to wonderful effect. Do you have a blog of your own? I would certainly love to follow it if you did. These are exactly the kinds of insights I\’m so keen to keep up on. Thanks again!

p.s. I love \”taught not caught\”.

If individuals are going to take advantage of the benefits of true intrinsic motivation by choosing topics that really interest them, setting challenging goals that are relevant to their lives and then pursuing and achieving those goals, they’ll probably want:
– individualized help in figuring out which topics and projects are the best match for their interests/skills/resources and desired applications of the learning
– other people (both learners and “experts”) who really care about the same topic to learn with and from
– coach(es) for accountability, resource help, literacy and skill development, guidance and encouragement
– tools for connecting to resources and people world-wide in their topic area

Perhaps in any classroom, you might find groups of two or three people who might share the same topic and goal for a while, but most often I think they would be individual projects/topics. When you start thinking down this path, you see that classrooms don’t make any sense as an organizing principle for this kind of activity.

I don’t know much about inquiry based learning. It was aparently used in the required classes in the cohort before mine at UIUC with very mixed results.
Here is a link to the infamous Schlep page that someone wrote in protest
http://www.inquiry.uiuc.edu/bin/update_unit.cgi?command=select&xmlfile=u10934.xml

However, I didn’t focus on instructional methodology much when I did my ed MA – I was more interested in program evaluation.