Inquiry Institute Reflection

     I did not really know what I was going to be getting into when I departed my place for the Inquiry Institute on Friday evening. I knew that we would be participating in lessons, but was not really sure what that meant as far as learning about inquiry-based learning. I mean, what the hell is inquiry-based learning to be honest?

    Going in, I thought that inquiry-based learning was the giving of information to students, and then allowing them to use that information to develop solutions or answers to questions that we as teachers, or they as students posed. I actually wasn't too far off, but I can tell you that it is not so much giving them information as it is allowing them to craft questions and hypothesize about possible results or solutions to said questions that they pose. This is the most advanced form of inquiry and can truly make for a pretty cool lesson. For example, we go to perform an Oreo Lab in which we tested to see if double stuf Oreos were truly double stuf. We got to formulate our own procedures and method for performing this lab and developed our own hypotheses as well. This is a great example of inquiry because we as the students were in control of how we would be getting our solutions and answers. 

    I wasn't really sure how inquiry worked, and I was sort of skeptical of my understanding of the overall content, but after reflecting on speaking with some of my cohort members, I developed a much better understanding of how inquiry can be used in my classroom. I want to try and incorporate at least one or two lessons in each of my units so that I can incorporate an inquiry-based lab or activity for my students to do some discovery and learning. 

Comments

  1. Morgan BearNovember 10, 2022 at 2:28 PM

    Baylor, haha... I have to agree, it was hard to forecast what this event was exactly going to be like... I was surprised with how "open ended" and curiosity based the entire inquiry process is! I can't wait to see how you integrate some of these lessons into your classes in the future!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Carly RudyNovember 13, 2022 at 11:14 AM

    Baylor, similar to you I had no clue what inquiry based learning was but I'm glad that we all were able to learn about this experience together. I'm excited to see how you take these activities and apply them into your classroom!

    ReplyDelete

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