Inquiry Part 1

…Inquiry is both natural and spontaneous state when we are engaged as learners seeking meaning..

-Concept-Based Curriculum and Instructions for the Thinking Classroom-

(Erickson, Lanning and French, 2017, p-88)

Imagine yourself,  if you can, in a classroom today at your age as a learner.  Consider the professor, teacher or workshop leader’s style of teaching.  Is it “stand and deliver” or collaborative?  Possibly a combination of both?  How do you feel in this class as a student?  Engaged, impatient, tired or preoccupied with other things?  If there is something you could change about the platform for your learning, what would it be?  Did you think the teacher was actually teaching and you were getting what you paid for? Have you ever been in a class based on inquiry?   

Now consider these questions for a young student sitting in a classroom for six hours.  Think of the different types of people these learners represent; the studious always engaged student, the reluctant student, the student who can’t sit still or the socially impulsive student who “in the day” got F’s for “deportment”.  There are many types of people who learn in many different ways and learning through inquiry, defined by different strategies, we know can help all learners connect constructively and productively with the subject matter

Inquiry can be defined as structured, guided or open.  Depending on the  content of the lesson, different strategies can be implemented--or maybe all of them in the same lesson.  Experience has also taught us that inquiry as a teaching strategy can at times be very uncomfortable for some teachers.  They either see it as a free for all or as giving up control and thus evaluated as a bad teacher.  So, we’d like to explore this whole topic a bit more so you can better understand why we think inquiry is “at the heart of it”.

The desire to learn is inherent. We are born with curiosity and the drive to understand and interact with the world around us. Very young children observe and imitate. They try to grasp and manipulate objects, move their bodies towards interesting sounds or sights, and learn through trial and error and cause and effect.

In early childhood, ages 3-5, we see the emergence of play. Children are still imitating what they see and learning by doing. Consider a three-year-old child exploring water play in a classroom sensory tub. To many onlookers this may not look like an educational learning opportunity at first glance. It’s “just a child playing with water.” She fills and empties small containers, stirs the water with utensils, splashes, and navigates the use of tools and space (both socially and physically) with other children around her. She may not have the language to ask the questions but she certainly wonders how all of this works and is driven to figure it out. When she inadvertently splashes a peer and the child cries, she’s learning cause and effect. When she stirs the water with a spoon, she might be modeling something she’s seen a parent do and she’s finding out that she can use tools to accomplish tasks. When she pours water from one container to another she is learning about the physics of volume and space, as well as developing her fine motor skills. She didn’t ask about any of these things and her teacher may or may not have those intended outcomes in mind. But from a very young age, humans are inquirers. We want to discover how the world works.

Dani’s example of inquiry in action with a group of preschool children:

Creek Ice
Small group hikes at Dodge Nature Preschool offer a multitude of opportunities for young children to engage in inquiry and for teachers to observe and document what the children are learning. While this is not a typical classroom setting, inquiry can happen anywhere at any time. We just need to be mindful and intentional allowing it to happen. Consider ways to encourage inquiry in your own setting.  On this particular hike, I spent time with six children as they suddenly veered off-trail and headed to the creek to look at the ice. On that day they noticed many changes and made a lot of observations around ice and water. Here are some of the things they noticed:

Child: This ice is safe – I hit it with my stick and it didn’t break.
Child: Look, there’s ice UNDER ice here.
Teacher: What does that look like, that shape in the ice?
Child: It looks like circles.
Child: Yeah, or bubbles.
Teacher: Yes! Air bubbles trapped in the ice. What happens if you poke at them with your sticks?
Children: They break! That ice isn’t so strong! Let’s call that bubble ice!
Child: The bubble ice is easy to break, and there’s more ice under it.
Child: This looks like a skating pond.
Child: The ice isn’t thick in places where it’s black. I can see water under there.
Teacher: Yes, when I jump on the ice, watch that black spot.
Child: The water moved when you jumped!
Child: Hey, there’s slush on top of the ice here.
Child: Look guys, more water!
Child: This ice looks like it can break because it’s dark.
Child: Look, there’s sticks here. Like a bridge.

The children spent about half an hour along the edges of the creek testing ice, breaking through weak spots with their sticks, and finding safe places to step on the ice and on branches to get to the other side. I think it’s important to note that for young children, the inquiry process doesn’t always start with a question they can verbalize. The process starts with curiosity, something they notice and want to explore. Sometimes they ask questions. Sometimes teachers ask questions to nudge them toward their own discoveries. Often children compare what they notice to something else, something familiar. In this instance the children learned about different states of water, solid and liquid. They learned that there are layers in ice. They learned about looking closely at the ice and testing it for safety. They learned that they can use their brains and their bodies to get themselves safely across the creek. What makes it all so meaningful is that I didn’t tell them any of that. I followed them to the creek, made sure they were staying safe while they explored, asked a few questions, and just let them learn.

These are some examples of all categories of inquiry working with young children.  The same principles are applied to older students and even adults.  As an adult, a form of guided inquiry can be explained by the following example which, by the way, actually happened and is one reason I began the study of inquiry as a principle of best practice.

Judy’s example of inquiry in action with adult learners

At the first meeting of a graduate course in counseling, we were given the final exam straight out.  I was astonished at this and, to be honest, quite excited.  “What a concept” I said to myself.  A teacher telling me what I am to learn, what is important to understand and what he, the teacher, determines to be of value in my understanding of the content.  There were no secrets!  The students weren’t guessing and the teacher was telling us how to uncover that which we were to know.  I loved this.  I dug right in and read what I needed to read for understanding. I listened to lectures for details of knowledge and how things related to each other and engaged at my level of need and understanding.  Wow!  My understanding of education and how to educate changed immediately.  What if we as teachers told the students the standards and details they were to know and understand and then presented them with alternative strategies to discover these understandings?  All of this led to my inquiry into inquiry and my professional experience took a new path.

         In our next blog we will explore using inquiry with older children and pull all of our discussions and examples of inquiry into a conclusion explaining why we feel inquiry is “ at the heart of it”.  Until next time………..