On the Ground with Guided Inquiry

Implementation is never easy with a complex design like Guided Inquiry. I'm dedicated to puzzling through the trouble spots, highlighting the successes and sharing the learning along the way.

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Failures = Learning

I had a set back in my inquiry yesterday that I am disappointed in.  Even though the stars seemed to be aligning for the inquiry we were to embark on, there was a snag in the plan. It was the fault of no one but gives me great pause when even really good thoughtful inquiry minded educators, in a setting that requires and values 'inquiry learning' chose activity based small units over an extended inquiry with student choice, voice and creativity.  These small units lend themselves to fact finding endeavors not deep reflective learning that I mean when I talk about inquiry.  Inquiry in my mind is not finding facts to do a task.  Inquiry is asking real and deep questions about a topic that I am interested in so that I may grow my learning and understanding and share it with others.  

Is this a dead end for me... or do I go on and see what happens?  Either way, I have learned a lot through this experience already- about systems, communication, and what it really takes, the habits of mind of a teacher, to embrace inquiry LEARNING and take the risk to let kids pave the way.

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Backstories from Museum exhibits

Now that I am thinking about this visit to the museum as the open for our inquiry, I want the museum experience to reach into the classroom more readily.  Wouldn't it be great to have the backstories, or some original documents that they used to create the exhibit to be available (online) for students to dig into the content more deeply once back in school?  Students' interest would be piqued and they would be driven to learn about people, events and content on their own as their question guides them.  Without these backstories... the museum exhibit stays there in the experience, as rich as it is, it isn't enough.  With the common core's push to include more non-fiction texts in school, museums could help us make these texts rich and relevant to what we are teaching and connect to their exhibits.  We gotta work together and make these available.  Let's make an app for that! 

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Starting with Open

In our unit with the 4/5th graders on Colorado history, we are going to begin with a trip to the CO History museum to get multiple perspectives on why people immigrated to Colorado.  The students will be addressing the lines of inquiry from the IB curriculum: 

How a society manages resources affects the world around them.

Lines of inquiry:

1.     Relationship between land and people

2.     Ripple effects of resource management

3.     Rights and responsibilities of a society in managing finite resources

Key Concepts: Connection, Causation, Responsibility

The students will experience how and why different people chose to live in Colorado at various times through history.  They will also see how the local American Indians used the natural resources to live in this place.  So they will go to the museum with an eye on people and resources.  The teacher hopes that this introduction will help them think about resources in new ways as well as get a feel for which group they would like to investigate in more depth.  Each student will choose a group to explore the lines of inquiry and key concepts.  We are hopeful that students will find a group they are passionate about and will enjoy investigating.  We believe that if they dig deeply into one group, they will understand the concept and be able to transfer that understanding to other groups and people across time.

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Shaping future generations is serious business.  

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“We all know that what will transform education is not another theory, another book, or another formula but educators who are willing to seek a transformed way of being in the world.” -Parker Palmer

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Too much content to teach?

Too much content not enough time is a great rationale for implementing an inquiry approach.  Let me explain.  There is way too much information to teach all our students everything.  We don't have the time, and covering material is not going to get us to the deep learning needed.  

Resort to bigger concepts and overarching questions that all students can investigate and then give students choice in what the smaller topic is of the larger concept that they can really dig into.  This way your teaching them the important stuff in the context of their passions or interests within the subject.  More to come on how this looks with a group of Colorado 4th and 5th graders in their resources/history unit.  Wish us luck!

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When it's time to turn it over to the kids, they move to help me help me mode. So they need strategies to persist through the process. - Fourth/Fifth Grade Teacher