Inquiry Schools

A request yesterday for the Inquiry Schools "Water Crossing" video, led us to revisit the Inquiry Schools website, where we discovered several more videos dealing with the Inquiry Process, chiefly one dealing with the topic of energy. Again, what impresses us with the work of Inquiry Schools is how clearly they lay out the Inquiry Process to be used in schools. In our own discussions with teachers we find that, too often, teachers underestimate the amount of time students need to think about the topic initially, and how much open exploration they ought to be allowed to do. Furthermore, these teachers tend to try to constrain the activity to their own class, or to a specific outcome. To us, ideally, Inquiry Projects are cross-curricular, grouped around very broad themes, such as water, energy, transportation, etc., allowing students to find their own area of interest within that. Furthermore, by extending the project across several subject areas, it not only increases the likelihood that students will find an area of interest, but also allows the teacher to increase the instructional time devoted to the early reflection and exploration stages. Rather than trying to shoehorn an introductory episode into a 45 minutes class, piggybacking on another subject class or two enables this precious time to be doubled, or even tripled. Of course, this raises the question of what kind of outcome ought to be expected, as a particular student might be working on the same topic for Social class, as opposed to English class. Any project outcome or rubric therefore needs to be developed in such a manner as it provides for elements common to all involved subjects, but also contains a subset that would respect specific knowledge, skill, or attitude outcomes of individual subjects.