Imagine a classroom where curiosity is encouraged, passions are celebrated, and students’ choices and voices are honored. A space that engages and motivates students to take ownership over their own learning goals and fosters their curiosity while deepening their understandings (beyond memorizing facts and content). This classroom can, and does exist – it is an inquiry-based learning classroom!

What exactly is inquiry-based learning?

Inquiry-based learning is a process where students take on a more active, meaningful, and personalized role in their learning (MacKenzie, 2018).  Through inquiry, students create essential questions, investigate widely, and build new learnings, knowledge, and understandings as they become content-area experts (Wolpert-Gawron, 2016).  The knowledge students gain is presented to others in a public manner and can often result in meaningful action.  At its core, inquiry-based learning prepares students for the world of tomorrow through creating authentic connections and acquiring 21st century skills (2018).

Types of inquiry

Created by local, inquiry-based educators – Trevor MacKenzie and Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt. This sketchnote can be found on Trevor’s website.

When new to the inquiry process, teachers often begin in the structured phase. As you, and your students, become more comfortable with the inquiry process – you can move towards the free inquiry phase.

4 main phases of the free-inquiry cycle

  1. Students develop questions they are genuinely interested in/personally meaningful to them-Students are the thinkers, and drive their learning process by choosing appropriate, essential questions. The role of the teacher is to guide students to enhance their questions but not to create or provide the questions for students to solve (2016).
  2. Research-Teachers can guide students where to look for information but inquiry is about allowing students to discover what they need to know, on their own. If you feel your students don’t yet have the skills to seek out their own information, you can provide a collection of resources from which they can select their evidence (2016).
  3. Students present what they have learned-Students have the opportunity to share their learning in diverse ways that suit them. This is also an opportunity for them to teach others about their topic – effectively increasing their motivation and self esteem.
  4. Students reflect on what worked/what didn’t work-Reflection provides an opportunity for students to understand the cause and effect relationships of content and helps to build cross-curricular connections.

Things to keep in mind while integrating inquiry-based learning in your classroom

  1. If students are struggling to come up with essential questions, you can guide them with a ‘provocation’. A provocation can be an image, story, article, video etc. that arches the theme of the content area/learning standards you are hopeful to cover through the inquiry process (2018).
  2. You can pause the inquiry process at any time and incorporate mini-lessons to teach students specific skills they may be lacking to achieve their final goal (2016).
  3. Make sure to celebrate students work! Invite other classes, parents, administrators, or community members to view the students’ work. They just completed creative independent research on something they care about and that is something to celebrate!

Inquiry in Action-A video of Elementary students practicing inquiry

How does inquiry-based learning align with growth-mindset?

Inquiry-based learning involves a pattern of questioning, discovering, trying (and sometimes failing), while reflecting on the growth and learning that happens during the process. Growth mindset is very similar – we learn through our mistakes and see failure as an opportunity to grow and learn. Our lesson on growth mindset will integrate inquiry-based learning as we have our students move through the modules with a focus on discovery, student-centered (and paced) lessons, and personal reflection throughout the process.

 

Resources:

MacKenzie, T. (2018). Inquiry Mindset-Nurturing the dreams, wonders, & curiosities of our youngest learners. Published by ElevateBooksEdu.

Wolpert-Gawron, H. (2016). What the Heck is Inquiry-Based Learning? Teachers use inquiry-based learning to boost student engagement. Retrieved from: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/what-heck-inquiry-based-learning-heather-wolpert-gawron