Dive Into Enquiry Microbook

Introduction

Hear from the author

Want to make learning more meaningful in your classroom? Looking to better prepare your students for the world of tomorrow? Keen to help learners create authentic connections to the world around them?

ith Dive into Inquiry you’ll gain an understanding of how to best support

your learners as they shift from a traditional learning model into the inquiry classroom where student agency is fostered and celebrated each and every day. This book strikes a perfect balance of meaningful pedagogy, touching narrative, helpful processes, original student examples, and rich how-to lesson plans all to get you going on bringing inquiry into your classroom.

Hear from the author

After reading this book educators will feel equipped to design their own inquiry units in a scaffolded manner that promote a gradual shift of control of learning from the teacher to the learner. Exploring student passions, curiosities, and interests and having these shape essential questions, units of study, and performance tasks are all covered in this powerful book. Learn to keep track of the many inquiry topics in your classroom and have students take ownership over their learning like never before!

What is a Microbook?

Microbooks pick up on the idea of microlearning, a concept that's revolutionizing education by offering short bursts of learning that can initiate exposure, interaction, knowledge construction and reflection for teachers.

Elevate Books Edu and Book Creator have teamed up to bring you a series of microbooks that impact teaching and empower learning. These books will offer a glimpse into some of the most popular concepts and ideas in education today, with a link to buy the full book if you like what you see and want to continue the journey.

Inquiry is the dynamic process of being open to wonder and puzzlements and coming to know and understand the world.

—Alberta Focus on Inquiry, 2004

Inquiry-based learning is a process where students are involved in their learning, create essential questions, investigate widely, and then build new understandings, meanings, and knowledge. That knowledge is new to the students and may be used to answer their essential question, to develop a solution, or to support a position or point of view. The knowledge is usually presented to others in some sort of a public manner and may result in some sort of action.

—Alberta Focus on Inquiry, 2004

Types of Student Inquiry is a scaffolded approach to inquiry in the classroom, one that gradually increases student agency over learning whilst providing learners with the necessary skills, knowledge, and understanding to be successful in their inquiry.

—Trevor MacKenzie

Sample chapter

Creating the Authentic Piece

erhaps the most meaningful step for students in the Free Inquiry process is

creating something to reflect their understanding of their essential question. I love this time.

If scaffolded properly using the Types of Student Inquiry, the tenets of Understanding by Design, and a strongly structured and supported Free Inquiry unit, students’ authentic pieces inspire and resonate.

I keep them for years and share them with students preparing for their own Free Inquiry unit, colleagues considering initiating an inquiry process in their own classroom, on social media, and with my Personal Learning Network (“PLN”) on Twitter, or at workshops and conferences across the continent.

Authentic pieces inspire and resonate. I keep them for years and share them often.

#DiveintoInquiry

Authentic pieces begin with students genuinely deciding how they want to demonstrate their understanding. I ask them, “If you could demonstrate your understanding in any way, what would it be? Are you really good at something you feel would help communicate your understanding of your essential question?” Inevitably, these questions lead students to consider authentic pieces to simultaneously reflect their learning and engage an audience.

I always ask students to connect their authentic piece to the learning standards of our course. Their piece must summarise their learning and reflect, to an extent, the must-know content our course demands. In my English classes, this can look like a personal narrative essay. In science classes, it might look like following the scientific method. In social studies classes, it can be an essential question explored through a specific time period or historical event. In math classes, it can look like mathematical problem solving, strategies, and equations from the course curriculum.

Regardless of what students design for their authentic piece, they must abide by these criteria. I assess this requirement is met during the one-on-one meeting I have with each student when I review their proposal and look for evidence that their authentic piece fits into the learning objectives of the course.

When I have seen inquiry fall short, it’s due, in part, to the gap between the voice and choice provided to students and the course curriculum

and learning standards of the grade level. By ensuring their Free Inquiry unit and, more specifically, their performance task (i.e., authentic piece) is up to this standard, I am closing this gap.

Throughout their Free Inquiry unit, students are gathering learning evidence to scaffold the creation of this authentic piece. Now it is time to put it all together. I ask students to complete a few tasks to help guide them to a successful performance task and deepen their understanding of their essential question.

Task #1: Co-construct criteria for the authentic piece.

Shortly after students meet with me to pitch their proposal, we spend time co-constructing criteria for their authentic piece. Clearly, student ownership over their learning witnessed during our school year is powerful, but I believe when we include student self-assessment of their learning, we take this agency to another level.

When we include self-assessment of their learning, we take student agency to another level.

#DiveintoInquiry

When students can build the assessment piece of the performance task, they are more easily able to recognise how to make improvements and revisions to their work. Further, I find students are more likely to achieve a performance task they are happy with—one meeting or exceeding the criteria we’ve built—because creating it gives them a clear and deep understanding of how to do well. Prior to their learning being published, I ask students to self-assess their authentic piece using this co-constructed criteria. During this process, I witness students revising and enhancing their authentic piece in powerful ways. The pride they take in their learning and the attention to detail they demonstrate when self-assessing is something that cannot be replicated in any other assessment strategy.