As professionals, we are actively engaging in professional learning around Inquiry-Based Learning. I along with Ms. Kim, Ms. Younger, Ms. Olson, Ms. Souter, Mme. Pagnotta and Mme. Freitas attended a professional learning session on Tuesday morning with 60 other teachers from our Family of Schools to learn more about how to implement this teaching and learning strategy in the classroom. Ms. Kim and I were both able to lead a part of this professional learning and would like to share a bit about this pedagogy.
Inquiry-based learning is an approach to teaching and learning that places students’ questions, ideas and observations at the centre of the learning experience. Educators play an active role throughout the process by establishing a culture where ideas are respectfully challenged, tested, redefined and viewed as improvable, moving children from a position of wondering to a position of enacted understanding and further questioning.
For students, the process often involves open-ended investigations into a question or a problem, requiring them to engage in evidence-based reasoning and creative problem-solving, as well as "problem finding." For educators, the process is about being responsive to the students’ learning needs, and most importantly, knowing when and how to introduce students to ideas that will move them forward in their inquiry. Together, educators and students co-author the learning experience, accepting mutual responsibility for planning, assessment for learning and the advancement of individual as well as class-wide understanding of personally meaningful content and ideas.
Inquiry-based learning concerns itself with the creative approach of combining the best approaches to instruction, including explicit instruction and small-group and guided learning, in an attempt to build on students’ interests and ideas, ultimately moving students forward in their paths of intellectual curiosity and understanding.
