At the beginning of my learning journey, I thought of inquiry learning as one, single, distinct aspect of a unit of work. In most cases, it was part of a research task, used in alignment with assessment requirements. Generally, however, it was not something I could envision incorporating as a regular part of my teaching in an already crowded curriculum. There was simply no time.
I have come a long way since then. Now, I understand how essential inquiry learning is and its connection with 21st Century skills and the development of information and digital literacies. Inquiry learning naturally incorporates questioning and evaluative frameworks, like the GeSTE windows (thereby aligning with many of the cognitive verbs for the syllabus). This encourages students to critically analyse and form judgements in relation to sources. Furthermore, inquiry learning provides extensive opportunities for students to collaborate and learn from each other as well as demonstrating their own creativity. In this way, it effectively caters for different learning styles and helps students play to their strengths, increasing confidence. Therefore inquiry learning is not just for extension students. The various models of inquiry allow for differentiation by adjusting the level of scaffolding and guidance provided. Elements of inquiry can be included in every unit of work and can be a powerful tool to both engage and empower students. Designing the unit of work on the Frontier Wars has allowed me to envision how this could potentially work in the classroom.
Although I would not be teaching this unit of work directly, there are many opportunities for me to be involved through my role as the teacher-librarian. These include: leading mini-lessons using the questioning or evaluative frameworks, helping students to locate information and suggesting resources for both teachers/students. Indeed, I have resourced most of this unit already.
Given my background as a history teacher, incorporating inquiry approaches in the history curriculum has been relatively easy for me. Going forward, I would like to learn more about how to do this effectively in other disciplines and how the approach taken in other subjects would differ (or not) from that in history. Lastly, I am keen to see how my proposed unit works in practice next year and hope to gather student feedback on the inquiry approach. I plan to use this feedback to continually refine and develop my proficiency as a teacher and teacher-librarian in implementing inquiry learning in my school. Therefore, my inquiry questions going forward are:
1. How can inquiry-learning approaches be implemented effectively in other subjects/disciplines? 2. What are the similarities and differences in inquiry-learning approaches in other subjects/disciplines? 3. How can I refine the Frontier Wars unit based on students' feedback and experiences?