Week 5 - EDIM-513 Inquiry-based learning

Week 5 - Reflection

What have I learned over the last several weeks about inquiry-based learning?  The last few weeks have helped define, provide examples and provide resources to implement inquiry-based learning into my classes.

The week three content focused on identifying questions that students can answer through investigations.  The main goal of taking this class is to be able to incorporate the theory presented and use it in my class content.  To achieve student learning that is at a deeper level, “Inquiry-based questions prompt students to gather, analyze, and interpret data” as indicated in Week 3: Inquiry-based learning from theory to practice Topic A Instructional Media at Wilkes University.  Students also need to think critically to make connections between what they are learning in class versus what they may encounter in a real-world situation.  The video of the Science teacher was useful to see the concepts presented in our course in action.  Similar to students that may understand a new concept better with illustrations and examples, I understand inquiry-based instruction better through watching the Science teacher in action.  The teacher provided concrete science concepts and allowed the students to conduct several investigations to test their theories.

As far as my class content, week 3 gave me new ideas on how to develop questions based on principles and theories that push students to dig deeper for thought provoking answers.  The Discovery Education Tech book is a useful tool for developing questions and activities in Personal Finance & Entrepreneurship.  The format of the tech book of engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate provides many resources that can be used for lesson planning and inquiry-based activities.  The format has activities that are for summarization and analysis of what was learned.  The elaborate and evaluate provide examples of inquiry-type questions that dig deeper into the content.

Week 4 module introduced me to the Pennsylvania Standards Aligned System. (SAS)   Standards-based teaching is important to my instruction in class. I always review the standards and essentials questions are intertwined into every lesson.  I will now also view the curriculum components from the SAS site.  The Big idea, Concepts, Competencies and Essential questions are all similar to what I currently use to organize a lesson.  This website is a good place to visit to make sure I am on target and also look for new ideas for essential questions.

Week 5 modules setup a framework to organize the components of a scientific explanation.  Make a claim about a problem.  Provide evidence of the claim.  Provide reasoning that links the evidence to the claim.  This is referenced from Week 5: Communicating for Inquiry-based learning, Topic B Instructional Media at Wilkes University.  Week 5 introduced us to a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools for presentations, mobile devices and communications.  I have often asked students to try new technology but not really have a good purposeful reason to switch to something new.  The Discovery Education website explain how to best use the different Web 2.0 tools and explains what is unique with each one.  Also, the inquiry-based scientific explanation helps to frame questions that are thought provoking for students.