INQUIRY: HOW KNOWLEDGE IS CREATED

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INQUIRYHOW KNOWLEDGE IS CREATED
Sharon Friesen Galileo Educational Network
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Agenda

• Your Experience
• A Closer Look At Inquiry
• Assessing An Inquiry Study
• Designing for Inquiry
• Tasks, Activities, Lessons
• Assessment

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Starting With You

• What is your experience with inquiry?
• What have you tried?

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Inquiry in Two Parts
Professionalism Teaching is a practice that we
practice upon Teachers inquire into their own
practice. They critique, question, interrogate
and improve their own practice through Action
Research.
In the classroom Teachers design inquiry-focused
studies and learning environments.
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History of Inquiry

• Socrates believed that knowledge was vital and
  could only survive in a dynamic environment of
  human inquiry.
• The legacy of Socrates would be continued by
  Plato who set up the Academy in 387 B.C. in order
  to continue the Socratic method of inquiry.

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• By doubt we are led to inquiry and from inquiry
  we perceive the truth. - Pierre Abelard 1079 -
  1142

All truths are easy to understand once they are
discovered the point is to discover them.
Galileo
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• "Knowledge," in the sense of information, means
  the working capital, the indispensable resources,
  of for further inquiry of finding out, or
  learning, more things. Frequently it is treated
  as an end in itself, and then the goal becomes to
  heap it up and display it when called for.
  -Dewey

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Defining Inquiry

• Inquiry is the investigation into an idea,
  question, problem or issue. It involves gathering
  information, building knowledge and developing
  deep understanding. Inquiry-based learning
  encompasses the processes of posing problems,
  gathering information, thinking creatively about
  possibilities, making decisions and justifying
  conclusions.

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Myths About Inquiry

• The teacher must never tell the students what
  they know.
• Inquiry-based teaching absolves the teacher of
  any responsibility to act on students incorrect
  conceptions.

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Myths

• In inquiry-based teaching, the teacher is only
  the facilitator.
• In inquiry-based teaching the teacher does not
  need to know anything about the subject matter,
  as it is the students who lead the inquiry.

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Myths

• In inquiry-based learning the students must learn
  everything by themselves
• Inquiry-based learning means uncontrolled
  exploration

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Myths

• In inquiry-based learning all student answers and
  responses are equally valid
• In inquiry-based learning students must do all
  learning cooperatively in groups.

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Myths

• Inquiry-based learning means lower standards.
• Inquiry-based learning de-emphasizes the
  basics.

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Key Features of Inquiry

• Creating Knowledge
• using or manipulating knowledge as in analysis,
  interpretation, synthesis, and evaluation, rather
  than only reproducing knowledge in previously
  stated forms. It involves idea improvement and
  ongoing feedback.
• Disciplined Inquiry
• gaining in-depth understanding of limited topics,
  rather than superficial acquaintance with many,
  and using elaborated forms of communication to
  learn and to express one's conclusions.
• Value Beyond School
• the production of discourse, products, and
  performances that have personal, aesthetic, or
  social significance beyond demonstration of
  success to a teacher.

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Examples of Inquiry

• Choose an example, either one I have suggested
  or one of your own.

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Designing For Inquiry
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Inquiry begins with the desire to understand.
All men by nature desire to know. - Aristotle

• a question
• an issue
• a problem
• an idea
• a puzzlement
• a wondering

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Beginning What Matters?

• Inquiry needs a topic
• It begins with a meaningful (real) question,
  problem or issue.
• This question, problem or issue can be initiated
  by the teacher or by students.
• It requires a strong mapping to the appropriate
  curricula

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Designing Tasks and Assessment

• The tasks that are assigned to students are one
  of the few variables under the control of
  educators that directly affect student
  engagement. Phillip C. Schlechty

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Creating Engaging Tasks
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Inside The Inquiry Classroom
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New Habits of Mind

• Questions of evidence
• How do we know what we know?
• Questions of viewpoint
• Who's speaking?
• The search for connections and patterns
• This might involve asking, 'What causes what?' or
  it might cause students to say, How is one thing
  related to another?
• Supposition, or 'How might things have been
  different?'
• Who cares?

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Assessment In The Inquiry Classroom

• Using Track Changes
• Peer Feedback in the secondary classroom
• Peer feedback in the elementary classroom - video

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Using Track Changes
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Peer Assessment
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Peer Assessment

• Co-constructing criteria
• Peer assessment

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Hard Fun

• If I could go through this experience again, I
  would. I loved the challenge. The cool thing was
  that sometimes no one knew the answer so we had
  to fight hard together to get one. Then when we
  got the answer it was our own, and we had
  discovered it. So why not go through the
  experience when you love what you do and feel
  like it is your very own?
• (Student)