Inquiry Based Learning and a Little Help Needed

If any of you come across science topics in magazines like Newsweek or Time or any newspaper, please send them down (especially if they have diagrams or graphs or pictures to go with them). Editorials on science topics are quite good, too. I'm sure I can find much of these online, but things are going to get busy soon (I'll still look). While I'll make copies, it will still be cool to have the authentic materials to show how "science literacy" is pretty important in an adult's life. You don't have to actively search out the materials, but just keep it in mind that they'd be good classroom resources (thanks!).

I attended a really cool workshop yesterday. The presenter had my attention for the entire day (8am-3pm). Ms. C based the workshop around "inquiry based learning." This type of learning is essential for science classes (in my opinion) and can be used in any classroom. To appease those in favor of the standardized tests, it is objective and standard driven and can help immensely on open-response questions (such as those seen on the New York Regents Tests). George Lucas' education foundation supports this type of learning and you can find schools focusing on it completely for any age level.

The main premise of "inquiry based learning" is to allow students to discover scientific concepts through challenging and authentic experiences. To make this more clear, students experience something like friction, genetics, air pressure, etc. before the teacher explains the concept or the student reads about it in the book. Students are asked to do activities with just the materials and instructions (with limited help from the teacher). This raises the bar for the student to rely upon his or her self and work cooperatively with his or her neighbors. They are asked to solve problems, create their own questions, and to take learning into their own hands. During and after the activity, students are asked questions that connect their experience to the learning objectives (and this is helped by the teacher's explanation, too).

Here are some more examples: Students put together a "bot-head" through picking cards with capital letters, lowercase letters, and mutations (these stand for dominant, recessive, and mutated traits). Students then roll dice or flip coins to determine which traits the bot gets (this hits the idea of probability and inheritance). Once students have a "bot-head" they mate their "bot-head" with another and repeat the process outlined above to get a baby, which has some of the traits of both parents. This activity might be more of an application of a previous lesson, but it allows the teacher to make probability memorable (especially for the kinesthetic learners) along with showing how traits are inherited and how different children can have the same and different traits. This experience then sticks with the student for a much longer time than a boring lecture or chapter reading and the result is solid knowledge for standardized tests and real life. Other examples are carrying out cool experiments like alka-seltzer in film canisters (with a bit of water), research projects into topics that interest the students as long as they are withing the curriculum such as genetic disorders.

I'm totally excited about making many of my lessons inquiry-based. It might be as simple as introducing a small activity as the "bell-ringer," and using that as an example for my introduction to new material, or as extensive as students carrying out experiments for a science question that interests them. It's a method of learning and teaching that allows me to hit the Nature of Science strand each day and to give my students an authentic learning experience. If this is successful, then students will also see science as having relevance in their lives as they apply the results of what they experience to not only their learning but everyday problems (nothing beats having a class excited about learning). An understanding of air pressure can help a person understand the weather along with "un-popping" his or her ears when under water or in a plane. But that explanation will have to come later.