The Alchemy of Inquiry-Based Learning

Introduction:

Inquiry-based learning holds a promising future for education. We are beginning to see an educational shift today where the emphasis is placed not on students’ ability to recall content from curriculum, but their ability to be abstract thinkers, what Schnellert and Butler define as an alchemy of active learners who are “exploring to learn.”1 In a highly technological age for which we are unable to anticipate future jobs, inquiry-based learning encourages students to undergo a process to enrich their critical thinking skills and be self-sufficient enough to manage new challenges. If the content of curriculum cannot attend to student challenges, the catalyst for success is to develop discerning thinkers able to overcome any future trials from an innovative workplace. More than ever, we need education to make students robust thinkers!

In my experiences I have discovered six attributes required to personalize education for students. Here is an outline of their essential characteristics.

Inquiry-Based Learning: The Six Key Attributes:

1. Prior Knowledge:

Neuroscientists are discovering that each of us is a bundle of experiences, comprising in whole our personality. As sentient individuals, we make personalized connections that link our interest and curiosity to the world. It is why Zemelman and Daniels remind us that ”social studies learning should build on students’ prior knowledge of their lives and community, rather than assuming they know nothing about the subject.”2 Student experiences must matter if we hope young children draw interest in the issues that surround them such as community, global warming, hunger, or other conflicts.

We need to give students the opportunity to feel motivation for the educational process. Significance to any subject is predicated on personal connections that students experience, as opposed to a theoretical detachment that disengages students from subjects.

2. Ownership:

In education, we need to nurture student participation. Aside from the academic component to pedagogy, character education has helped develop students’ values that range from responsibility, respect, to empathy. For students to embrace ownership, we must awaken their awareness and sensitivity to education so that they may initiate a personal relationship to the world. Teachers can no longer allow students to coast indifferently through direct instruction, but share in the process of learning because “the agent of learning is the student…all the strategies of assessment for learning are geared toward giving them informed control, toward working with them to help students be the best they can be.”3 To make this objective possible, educators must appeal to the learning styles in every student to create active and engaged learners.

3. Metacognition:

Progress in life hinges on our ability to use thinking skills and find creative solutions to the challenges that have an impact on our curiosity and concerns. To make any positive contributions, students must inculcate their minds with the awareness that intelligence is the source of their personal development. Educators call this type of thinking metacognition, “the process by which students use their critical thinking skills to improve their comprehension skills. It involves students understanding “knowledge of self…knowledge of task… (and) knowledge of learning strategies.”4 As teachers, we require students to be cognizant of their thinking skills so that they are not only aware of knowledge to accomplish essential skills, but be proficient enough to use creativity to problem-solve the new trials facing their future.

4. Assessment:

With inquiry-based learning, the focus of assessment moves away from curriculum toward the student. A new philosophy of assessment has to embrace inquiry-based learning. How is it possible? “The new pedagogy flips the role of students and teachers where students are knowledge workers, learning to learn and think better, and where teachers see assessment as feedback about their impact and engage in dialogue with students about their aspirations and progress.”5 Assessment has to be directed toward the learner, not the subject. The source of validity in assessment may be discovered in Cris Tovani’s observation: “when I am assessing students, I look at the way they are using strategies…I am looking for evidence of their thinking.”6 The purpose behind any evaluation originates in the living and thinking mind, the ability for students to find reason in the culture of learning and meet new challenges in their future.

5. Student Perspective:

Rote memory has proven to have a negligible effect in education. Expecting students to remember facts without any significance discourages relevance in our educational system. In Mathematics, memorization of the multiplication facts lacks meaning to students, for example, if they do not understand the meaning of numbers. Automaticity in the multiplication times table, however, enables students to recall products because they have been taught place value and the connection numbers have to each other. Whenever students understand the relationship numbers have with our world, they begin to see patterns, even integrate their understanding to the subject of Physics where the language of mathematics is used to comprehend the universe.

Education is even changing with the concept of spelling dictation. According to Scott-Dunne, a Student Achievement Officer with the Ministry of Education in Ontario Canada, spelling has now to be taught “in a very different way, through inquiry and investigation, by engendering a love of words, by using higher order thinking instead of rote memory.”7 Words do not function in isolation. They require an array of strategies from phonemic awareness to syntactic awareness to their specific meaning if educators are to develop skilful readers.

Inquiry-based learning is individualized education. “By asking open-ended questions, we allow students to take their learning to their best level…to personalize the differences in ways of life and in human beings.”8 Knowing facts about our environment, for example, students begin to internalize their part in the general maintenance of ‘green living.’ It is through their understanding and interest that they may become advocates for positive change through a scientific understanding of ecology. In essence, inquiry-based learning has the potential to put students’ knowledge into practice as stewards of the earth.

6. Motivation

Inquiry-based learning is part of learning styles. Teachers realize each student learns differently from their peers. Through learning styles, the methods by which students learn most effectively may range from an array of styles that include auditory, visual, and kinesthetic approaches. If one is to walk into a classroom where a science unit on Space is being taught to students using learning styles, a group of children may be reading about planets while another group may be constructing these identical spheres according to their size and order. One witnesses two styles of learners accomplishing the same goal: knowledge of planets within our Solar System.

Students are open to subjects through their own process of learning. “Teachers’ sense of efficacy is a judgment about capabilities to influence student engagement and learning, even among those students who may be difficult or unmotivated.”9 As part of inquiry-based learning, teachers undergo a process to discover students’ curiosity in their distinctive manner of understanding, the ultimate respect we may demonstrate to any learner.

Conclusion:

Learning is about choice. As soon as students enter school, they must begin to construct an understanding of themselves as critical and creative thinkers linked to the world. Teachers must help them to explore the nature of their thinking so that they may build the autonomy to be life-long learners. After all, the ‘gradual release of responsibility’ is a term used in education meaning teachers use stages of explicit instruction with students to build a particular skill so that they become master experts in its use.

Educators are solely in classrooms so that students may become their own teachers. Inquiry-based learning informs us that we must be mentors to students “When students are given choices about what they read and write, they are more likely to want to practice and persevere as they encounter new challenges. Students become strong readers and writers when the scaffolding we provide is gradually removed as they become more independent.” 10 Without values such as responsibility, respect, perseverance, empathy, all the knowledge in the world would lose meaning to each one of us, rendering it an inert reality. Inquiry-based learning never loses touch with what matters to a student’s perspective.

References

1. Leyton and Schnellert and Deborah L. Butler, “Collaborative Inquiry, Empowering teachers in their professional development,” Canada Education Vol. 54 No. 3 June 2014.

2. Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde, ‘Best Practice, Today’s Standards for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools 3rd Edition,’ (2005). Heinemann, New Hampshire.

3. Faye Brownie and Leyton Schnellert, ‘It’s all about thinking,’ (2009). Portage and Main Press, Winnipeg, MB, Canada.

4. Stuart Shanker, ‘Calm, Alert and Learning: Classroom Strategies for Self-Regulation,’ (2012). Pearson Education Canada.

5. Michael Fullan, ‘Stratosphere,’ (2013) Pearson Canada Inc., Toronto, Ontario.

6. Cris Tovani, ‘Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?’ (2004) Stenhouse Publishers, Portland Maine.

7. Doreen Scott-Dunne, ‘When Spelling Matters,’ Principal Connections Vol. 17 Issue 3, summer 2014

8. Jennifer Katz, ‘Teaching to Diversity, the Three-Block Model of Universal Design for Learning,’ (2012). Portage &Main Press, Winnipeg, MB, Canada.

9. Maya Sadder and Gabrielle Nidus, ‘The Literacy Coach’s Game Plan, Making Teacher Collaboration, Student Learning, and School Improvement a Reality,’ (2009). International Reading Association, Inc. Newark DE 19714-8139, USA.

10. Bonnie Campbell Hill and Carrie Ekey, ‘Enriching Classroom Environments, Rubrics And Resources For Self-Evaluation And Goal Setting, (2010) Heinemann, Portsmouth NH.

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