Why Inquiry? Part II

From Stephanie: The Art and Science of Inquiry

Did you grow up in a frugal family? Consider this childhood checklist:

• Did you ever eat your morning cereal out of a recycled Cool Whip bowl?
• Could you distinguish a Phillips from a flat head before you could write your name?
• Did dad put tape over light switches so you wouldn’t turn on too many lights?
• Did mom cut your hair? Or worse yet…give an at-home spiral perm?
• Do Capri pants offer a nostalgic feeling of hand-me-down floods?

The Breakfast Bowl of Champions

When I began to formally study inquiry, I found myself reflecting on the penny-pinching ways which shaped my experiences as a learner. Today, I think we’d affectionately call my parents DIYers.

I am grateful for the impact they have had on my overall disposition toward learning. We were taught to seek challenges, ask questions, and work toward unconventional solutions.

These dispositions are found in Pillar One of the “Two Pillars of Inquiry,” which provide foundational support to HSE²¹.

The Two Pillars of Inquiry

In my formal review of the literature about Inquiry, I found over 40 different structures for inquiry models. Each structure moved quickly from pedagogy to the "how-to"—perhaps too quickly. As teachers, we often appreciate the how-to, but there is a danger in moving to action before we examine our “way of being” or the constructivist habits of our daily classroom lives.

In an attempt to live in a worlds of both the art and science of teaching, I had to develop a framework for inquiry that would honor both.

Pillar 1

Pillar 2

The Essence: The Art of Teaching ·         My Image of the Child ·         My Beliefs About Grit ·         A Way of Being that Happens Daily ·         My Questioning Practices ·         Our Classroom Culture If Pillar 1 classroom culture is not in place our project work in Pillar 2 will fall flat.

The Action: The Science of Teaching ·         Our Curriculum ·         The Structure We Use for Project Work ·         Planned Events and Efforts ·         Structured Questions that Move Us Along Through the Phases of Project Work Pillar 2 work supports the demonstration of learned skills and content. We evaluate the students’ new found confidence and gauge the shift in dispositions toward learning.

From Meg Strnat: Teaching Students to Create More Beautiful Questions

Just as essential questions help teachers build a framework for teaching, questions are also a tool for students to drive their own learning. 

You can start simply.  For example, questions needed to drive student learning can be simple restatements of learning outcome statements posted by teachers for the day’s lessons, framed in the form of questions.  Early in the year, students can learn to rewrite the goal into a “big” question that is the focus of a lesson or series of activities.  Student or student groups can share their learning outcome questions, evaluate which questions are the most meaningful, and determine how to rewrite other questions to become more meaningful. 

Instead of simply stating daily goals, try having students turn
daily goals into questions.  This activity involves higher order thinking.  Having
students analyze which questions are most meaningful, tell why,
and rewrite others moves it even higher.

 The process is more complicated when students are choosing their own topics of study (such as in Genius Hour) or are choosing topics within a topic (as in PBL).  Students tend to start with a question that is open-ended but often predictable and not necessarily deep. A simple way to help students dig deeper with their questions is to have them consider multiple perspectives of a topic using categories.  

The Torrance Institute of Creativity uses categories such as these for creating questions: Arts, Basic Needs, Business, Defense, Environment, Ethics/Religion, Social Relationships, etc.  Using categories to create questions pushes students to think across disciplines, look at problems and questions through different “lenses,” choose from multiple possibilities, and thereby think more deeply and create much more useful questions. 

Try it for yourself.  Pick a topic you will be teaching and examine the topic through different lenses.  For example:

• What would a business person ask about your topic?
• What about an artist?
• What might an environmentalist ask?

Can you see how using this approach could help your students create more interesting, more thought-provoking, and more beautiful questions?

From Tom: Inquiry as Differentiation

Ponder this question: Isn’t inquiry-based learning differentiated instruction in its purest form? 

We all understand the necessity of differentiation in order to
meet the individual needs of our students.  However, it can be
difficult to plan units and lessons that do this well. 
Tom argues that inquiry can help.

All of our students have diverse factors that impact them within the educational setting, but when we use inquiry-based learning instead of traditional teaching models, we shift the focus from potential weaknesses to each student’s strengths, opening the opportunity for each student to learn and grow. 

When we provide our students with a project or a task and our goal is inquiry-based learning, the learning is naturally differentiated.  Each student begins the inquiry process and develops his or her driving question and strategies for reaching the end goal from his or her individual perspective and individual knowledge base.  This knowledge base may be limited or vast, depending on the student’s strengths, weaknesses, and previous learning experiences.  Whether high or low, the inquiry-based project begins at each student’s starting point and proceeds individually.  The learning outcomes stay consistent, but the journey is naturally differentiated for each student through the inquiry process.

When we use inquiry-based learning, we no longer are teaching to the middle of our student population, but we are creating equal opportunities for all students to learn, regardless of their prior experiences.  Inquiry provides students with a structure that pushes them and guides them instead of corrects them, and it results in a differentiated experience for all of the students participating in the classroom. 

We hope you have found these various perspectives on inquiry helpful.  What can you do to add more inquiry to your lessons and units?

Now that’s a question worth pondering.  Have a great week, HSE.

HSE Teaching and Learning Team