EDIM 513 Week 3 Updated Thoughts on Inquiry Based Learning

After investigating inquiry-based learning for the past two weeks, my views about the topic have not changed very much. I still believe that inquiry-based learning is a skill that needs to be taught to students at a young age. I also still believe that students need some form of direct instruction to give them the background knowledge that they can then use to form their own inquiry-based explorations and questions. The key to this as a teacher is to guide the students without simply giving them all of the information and answers. I also still believe that students who are given the opportunity to learn about things that they want to know about leads to a much more engaged student population. The challenging part about this as a teacher is keeping the students within the curriculum, while still giving them the largest amount of choices possible. 


One thing that I have realized over the past few weeks is that the level of inquiry-based instruction in a classroom can be looked at on more of a sliding scale than a set amount of teacher-directed and student-directed instruction. Some students will need more direction than others and that is ok. Inquiry-based learning is a great way to differentiate instruction in a classroom. 


I still have some concerns about how much time inquiry-based instruction may take compared to how much information needs to be covered in a curriculum. While in a perfect world the process of learning would be the most important thing during a school year, we as educators know that that is not always the case. We still must prepare for testing and get through the curriculum that the district provides. While these worries are not going away anytime soon, I have learned a few things that will allow me to incorporate inquiry-based learning into my curriculum. However, I am still not ready to dive headfirst into a full-blown inquiry-based environment. 


My two burning questions have not changed in the last two weeks. They remain, “how can I use inquiry-based learning in a rigidly structured curriculum, such as CPM?” and “how can inquiry-based learning be used in an online setting?” The second one of these questions is becoming more and more important, as schools make plans to offer online learning and hybrid learning models in the fall. I look forward to continuing to gain more knowledge about how to implement a discovery-based curriculum.


-Kyle


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