Bringing Inquiry-Based Learning Into Your Class In the shallow end of the Types of Student Inquiry pool, Structured Inquiry gives the teacher control of the essential question, the starting point—for example, “What defines a culture?” or “What is the importance of the scientific method?” These questions are not answered in a single lesson and do not have a single answer, and, in fact, our understanding of an essential question may change over time as we research it. In Structured Inquiry, the teacher also controls specific learning activities, the resources students will use to create understanding, and the summative assessment learners will complete to demonstrate their understanding. In Controlled Inquiry, the teacher provides several essential questions. How Are the Types of Student Inquiry Helpful? Inquiry is most successful when strongly scaffolded. This structure allows us to successfully address the curriculum and the “must know” content and skills of each discipline, grade level, and course. Second, think big and start small.
10 ways YouTube can engage your classes now YouTube can help teachers and students create powerful, engaging, creative videos. These options can help take your videos to the next level. (Flickr / Esther Vargas) YouTube is a behemoth. It’s not out there just for watching practical jokes, how-to’s on renovating your house or ridiculous sports feats. Here are some ways to leverage the YouTube beast to improve engagement and creativity your class: 1. Classroom application: Teach students a skill or concept by recording yourself (maybe in front of a white board). 2. Classroom application: Students can make these videos as class projects (assuming they have access to YouTube). 3. Classroom application: Make an overview video with snippets of all YouTube videos from your class, then link to the full-length video with an annotation (see No. 5 below). 4. Classroom application: Search for Creative Commons videos in the Video Editor. 5. Classroom application: Students (and adults!) 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Related September 14, 2015 In "Ed Tech"
11 Ways to Make an Inquiry based Classroom You became a teacher not to pontificate to trusting minds, but to teach children how to succeed as adults. That idealism infused every class in your credential program and only took a slight bump during your student teacher days. That educator, you figured, was a dinosaur. You’d never teach to the test or lecture for forty minutes of a forty-five minute class. Then you got a job and reality struck. You had lesson plans to get through, standards to assess, and state-wide tests that students must do well on or you’d get the blame. Until the inquiry-based classroom arrived where teaching’s goal was not the solution to a problem, but the path followed. One step at a time, and here are fifteen you can take. Flip the classroom The night prior to the lesson, have students read the lecture materials so you can spend class time in hands-on discovery. Don’t answer student questions–show them how to do it themselves. When students have questions, you guide them toward answers. Encourage questions.
Crafting Questions That Drive Projects Which comes first, the driving question or the learning goals? I think it depends. The most successful projects feed off of students’ passions. Don’t be afraid to tap into them. In my first year of teaching, my fifth graders were obsessed with SpongeBob Squarepants. What adventures would SpongeBob have during the Great Depression? So, to develop a driving question, you can use students' interest as a starting point and then creatively connect learning standards. Some of the learning aims my school had for students in math were working with decimals and graphing data. So, you can start with a topic or you start with learning standards to develop a driving question.
The art of inquiry: 10 practices for the inquiry teacher — Kath Murdoch Of all the blog posts I have written, the one that has been read, reposted and mentioned most often- is “How do inquiry teachers teach?” That was back in 2014. "How we teach slowly shapes the way young people respond to the unknown – to change, challenge, complexity and uncertainty….Our teaching can steer them toward becoming more positive, confident, and capable in the face of difficulty. What we teachers DO, SAY and think matters. Over the last few years, I have had the joy of collaborating with hundreds of teachers in a quest to dig deeper into the pedagogy of inquiry. So a new book is on its way! I am doing something I have not done before. The practices reflect what we have noticed when teaching 4-12 year olds. (not really in order...) 1. Inquiry teachers provoke, model and value curiosity – and they do this in a myriad of ways. 2. We all agree that questions lie at the heart of true inquiry. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Training Teachers to Teach Critical Thinking How KIPP educators instruct their colleagues to enhance their classroom practice. KIPP King Collegiate High School principal Jason Singer trains his teachers to lead Socratic discussions (above); Katie Kirkpatrick (right), dean of instruction, developed a step-by-step framework -- described below -- for teaching students basic critical-thinking skills. Credit: Zachary Fink Thinking critically is one thing, but being able to teach it can be quite another. Define what critical thinking in the classroom is. It's an approach to teaching that allows students to make sense of the content. How is your training session structured? It's a three-hour training on the frameworks that I use in my own course, which I generated from the Toulmin Model of Argumentation. The first step is to develop the questions that are going to frame your assignments. What are the right kinds of questions to ask? In figuring out what questions to ask, it's really helpful to look at Bloom's Taxonomy.
Driving Questions Now that we have looked at how to ask questions, let's look at why we ask questions. What is our objective? The kind of question we ask our students changes depending on how far along we have progressed in a project and on the mastery level of our students. As students proceed through a project, we can identify two levels of progression: horizontal and vertical. The major horizontal questioning stages encountered in the classroom are outlined below. At the Beginning of a Project: Brainstorming: The driving question is posed to get students' juices flowing about a topic. Organization: These driving questions help organize students' gathered thoughts into several overarching themes. During a Project: Exploration: The teacher chooses about five overarching ideas (key understandings) to focus on and asks open-ended questions to encourage students to expand their thinking on a topic and elaborate on those thoughts. Clarification: Student ask questions to clarify a point or a concept.
Using Project-Based Learning To Flip Bloom’s Taxonomy For Deeper Learning | TeachThought Using Project-Based Learning To Flip Bloom’s Taxonomy For Deeper Learning by Drew Perkins, Director of TeachThought PD One of the central features of high quality project-based learning is the pedagogical relationship between the Driving Question and the “Need to Knows” that stem from it. In the video below I use the Explain Everything app to show how teachers and schools, using a process of rich inquiry, can leverage great thinking and learning by flipping how you approach the concepts behind Bloom’s Taxonomy. Instead of starting at the bottom and focusing on the teaching and learning of content prior to moving up, consider flipping that approach by starting at the top and asking students to create an authentic product with a strong Driving Question. Doing this can help the teacher facilitate deeper learning of the content and skills we find at the lower level as students identify and pursue what they need to know, remember, and understand to create and meet the challenge of the project.