Such views could include artistic, scientific, historic, economic, and other perspectives. While disciplines should interrelate, inquiry learning includes the application of certain specific "ground rules" that insure the integrity of the various disciplines and their world views. An important outcome of inquiry should be useful knowledge about the natural and human-designed worlds.
How are these worlds organized? How do they change? How do they interrelate? And how do we communicate about, within, and across these worlds? These broad concepts contain important issues and questions that individuals will face throughout their lives. Also, these concepts can help organize the content of the school curriculum to provide a relevant and cumulative framework for effective learning.
An appropriate education should provide individuals with different ways of viewing the world, communicating about it, and successfully coping with the questions and issues of daily living. While questioning and searching for answers are extremely important parts of inquiry, effectively generating knowledge from this questioning and searching is greatly aided by a conceptual context for learning.
Just as students should not be focused only on content as the ultimate outcome of learning, neither should they be asking questions and searching for answers about minutiae. Well-designed inquiry-learning activities and interactions should be set in a conceptual context so as to help students accumulate knowledge as they progress from grade to grade.
Inquiry in education should be about a greater understanding of the world in which they live, learn, communicate, and work. There are several variations on inquiry-based learning. See the " Resources " section for more on these approaches. All rights reserved. Welcome to Inquiry-based Learning.
How has inquiry-based learning developed since it first became popular? How can I use inquiry-based learning in conjunction with other educational techniques? Tim O'Keefe, a teacher at the Center for Inquiry elementary school in Columbia, South Carolina, explains why he thinks inquiry is a much more effective teaching strategy than traditional chalk-and-talk. It was extremely gratifying to see the whole school community support each other and achieve a lot over this period of time.
This would have not been possible without the commitment of our students and teachers, who actively dedicated their time and energy towards strengthening the profile of an Inquiry based pedagogy within our school. Some of our achievements over this semester were as follows:. The members of the Student Council played an integral part in the building of a wider awareness for Inquiry across the school.
This involved the creation of several inquiry themed posters, unique to every subject taught within the school. Students from grade 6 demonstrating their Inquiry skills in a poster making competition. Students from grade six also contributed comprehensively to this. They created wonderful visual depictions of questions pertaining to the many aspects of their learning across different subjects.
Halfway through the semester, the student council created a video which captured the pulse of Inquiry within our school. They spontaneously interviewed students from grades six through twelve on a Wednesday afternoon, gauging the impact that inquiry made to their learning. Every teacher contributed towards fostering, nurturing and strengthening Inquiry across the school. This took place inside and more importantly, outside of the classroom too.
Reflection is key. Have students focus on how they learned in addition to what they learned. In terms of your content area, imagine a classroom where different kids are presenting their findings on a single, simple aspect of the content.
In terms of student achievement, the power of their question should help drive the research, the writing, and the presentation. It should help motivate them to become experts in their self-described field.
And the more often a student gets a taste of what it feels like to be an expert, in however small a concept, the more they will want that feeling later on in life. Students also begin to conduct research. Much of their learning occurs in a collaborative environment, rather than having students work individually.
In the "going further" and "reflection" phases, classmates have multiple opportunities to share ideas and communicate what they're learning. They are able to delegate jobs to one another; for instance, someone in the group may go through a resource book, someone may search online, and another team member may start collating the information. At the conclusion of their research, learners present their findings and the process by which they arrived at them - "taking action".
At OWIS, students do this through class presentations and inquiry exhibitions, which we invite parents to attend. Research shows that students have better academic outcomes when they learn through inquiry, rather than traditional methods such as memorisation. Students develop a deeper understanding of the material than they would by simply listening to a lecture or reading a textbook. In reality, the inquiry cycle is just a natural part of human curiosity. We are often using this cycle in our daily lives without even recognising it.
By making learning into an organic process, students are better able to fully understand the topic they are studying. Furthermore, inquiry cycles provide students with an enhanced sense of accountability as they contribute as members of a group. Additionally, students' access to technology can optimise the inquiry process, as learners use Web-based resources to fine-tune their hypotheses and locate relevant information.
Cycles of inquiry spark students' natural curiosity and set the stage for lifelong learning. If you'd like to learn more about how your child can discover new knowledge through cycles of inquiry, contact us or schedule a school tour and come visit us.
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