Sparking Inquiry in the Classroom

As a kid, I loved nature.  Growing up in a rural part of New Jersey and spending summers at the beach probably played a significant role in developing this interest. My parents would buy me and my brother all sorts of field guides to help support our curiosity and genuine interest in living creatures.  We would venture out on routine quests to either observe or collect specimens for further study.  Each expedition was driven by both observations and questions.  While we loved looking at various creatures, especially those that were hard to find, such as certain salamanders and snakes, questions kept driving us to want to learn more.  

The short walk down memory lane depicted above is a reminder of one of many driving forces that compelled me to become a science teacher.  It also captures vital components of the scientific method, of which inquiry is the most critical component.  While making observations is the first step, it is the questions that are developed during the initial stages of the process that are the most important, in my opinion.  Without these, it is challenging to establish a working hypothesis to test out.  

No matter the subject taught or concepts explored, questions are more important than answers if inquiry is the goal. The reason being is that the process of developing them on behalf of the learner is typically driven by relevance.  Or a teacher can use a scaffolded approach to spark deeper exploration of a topic through knowledge construction and application.  No matter the chosen path, an inquiry-based approach can be used to cultivate ownership of learning through disruptive thinking.  I define this as replacing conventional ideas with innovative solutions to authentic problems.  

While creating tasks that empower learners to develop their own questions is the ultimate goal, teachers can use scaffolded stems to get the ball rolling.  Below is a version of a resource that can be found in Chapter 4 of Disruptive Thinking in Our Classrooms. 

Each level has numerous question stems that can assist teachers in developing checks for understanding, performance tasks, projects, and assessments.  The overall goal is to work from the base level 4 as this is where authentic inquiry resides.  In a disruptive world, preparing students for the present and future relies on fostering inquiry in the classroom. Every problem throughout history that has been solved with an innovative solution began with some sort of question that probably morphed over time as an inquiry-based approach was applied. Thus, educators can leverage this powerful catalyst to future-proof learning for all kids.  

The Right Questions

“We get wise by asking questions, and even if these are not answered, we get wise, for a well-packed question carries its answer on its back as a snail carries its shell.”  - James Stephens

Questioning techniques are one of the easiest areas of instructional design that can be improved, at least in my opinion.  By looking at the question stems, one can determine the level of thinking our learners are expected to demonstrate.  Low-level examples almost always begin with who, what, where, when. These aren’t bad per se as you need knowledge to move up any knowledge taxonomy chart.  The problem is when questions reside here and don’t push kids to think and apply their thinking in more complex ways.  Learners also don’t find much purpose with these beyond just getting them right. 

Herein lies one of my major issues with how I see many digital game tools used in the classroom as typically comprised of low-level, multiple-choice options.  As I mentioned before, there is a time and place for this. However, it goes without saying that an emphasis on recall and memorization will not prepare kids adequately to thrive now and in the future.  Disruption caused by the 4th Industrial Revolution, and living in a knowledge economy, continues to teach us this lesson. If a student can easily Google the answer, then it goes without saying that the question isn’t very challenging.  In the end, questions are more important than answers if learning is the goal. More on this later. 

The image above provides a great visual to look at the types of questions that are asked in classrooms or on assignments and scaffold them in ways that empower learners to demonstrate high-level thinking as well as mastery of concepts.  It is important to note that each and every question doesn’t have to be at the uppermost levels of knowledge taxonomy.  The key is to try to bump them up when warranted, especially if they are at the foundational knowledge level.   If question stems begin with who, what, where, or when then there is a natural opportunity to tweak them in a way to get up to at least the understanding level.

Now don’t get me wrong; developing great questions that get kids thinking is excellent. However, the real goal should be the creation of performance tasks where learners are applying their thinking in relevant ways.  This is where the role of instructional design is critical.  When challenging learners through an authentic application where there is an underlying purpose, what results is natural inquiry.  During numerous coaching visits with schools across the country, I have seen this play out over and over again.  Students are so immersed in an activity that collaboration, creativity, and collaboration converge with thinking while they work to solve real-world predictable and unpredictable problems.  What results is that the students then develop and answer their own questions. 

The Rigor Relevance Framework, of which an iteration is pictured above, is a great tool that can assist teachers and administrators develop better questioning techniques and learning tasks to engage kids with a higher purpose.  What results is the process of inquiry, which fuels the learning process.  The right question isn’t necessarily about arriving at an answer per se, but instead it acts as a catalyst for the development of more questions.  

Ownership Through Inquiry

As a child, I was enamored by nature.  My twin brother and I were always observing and collecting any and all types of critters we could get our hands on.  Growing up in a rural area of Northwestern New Jersey made it quite easy to seek out and find different plants and animals on a daily basis.  We would spend countless hours roaming around the woods, corn fields, ponds, and streams in our quest to study as much local life as possible. It’s no wonder that I eventually became a science teacher as my surroundings growing up played a major role in my eventual decision to go into the field of education.  

To this day I still can’t believe how my mother tolerated us bringing an array of animals into the house.  For years my brother and I were particularly interested in caterpillars.  We would use encyclopedias and field guides to identify certain species that were native to our area. Through our research, we determined what each caterpillar ate and subsequently scoured trees, bushes, and other plants in our quest to collect, observe, and compare the differences between different species. We even kept journals with notes and sketches. When we were successful in locating these insects we then collected them in jars. Our research ensured that each species had the correct type of food as well as appropriate physical requirements to either make a chrysalis (butterflies) or cocoon (moths).  

In the case of moths, some were in their cocoons for months.  Hence, my brother and I stored these jars under our beds.  At times we forgot that we had these living creatures under our beds until at night we heard sounds of them flapping their wings and moving around the jars after emerging from their cocoons.  I can only imagine what my parents thought of this but am so thankful that they supported our inquiry in many ways from having encyclopedias available for research to providing us with the autonomy to harness our intrinsic motivation to learn.   Through it all our observations led to questions and together with my brother and I worked to find answers. Even though we were not always successful in this endeavor, the journey was worth it. Questions and even more questions drove the inquiry process for both of us and from there we leveraged available resources and synthesized what we had learned. 

Image credit

The story above is a great example of how my brother and I embarked on an informal learning process driven by inquiry.  We owned the process from start to finish and our parents acted as indirect facilities through their support and encouragement.  Both inquiry and ownership of learning are not new concepts, although they are both thrown around interchangeably as of late, especially ownership.  Deborah Voltz and Margaret Damiano-Lantz came up with this description in 1993:

Ownership of learning refers to the development of a sense of connectedness, active involvement, and personal investment in the learning process.  This is important for all learners in that it facilitates understanding and retention and promotes a desire to learn.

After reading this description I can’t help but see the alignment to the story I shared above.  We learned not because we had to, but because we wanted to.  Herein lies a potential issue in schools.  Are kids learning because they are intrinsically empowered to or are they compelled to through compliance and conformity?  The former results when learners have a real sense of ownership.  There are many ways to empower kids to own their learning. All the rage as of late is how technology can be such a catalyst. In many cases this is true, but ownership can result if the conditions are established where kids inquire by way of their own observations and questions.  WNET Education describes inquiry as follows:

"Inquiry" is defined as "a seeking for truth, information, or knowledge -- seeking information by questioning." Individuals carry on the process of inquiry from the time they are born until they die. Through the process of inquiry, individuals construct much of their understanding of the natural and human-designed worlds. Inquiry implies a "need or wants to know" premise. Inquiry is not so much seeking the right answer -- because often there is none -- but rather seeking appropriate resolutions to questions and issues.

The first sentence ties in directly to the concept of ownership, but we also see how important are questions.  This is why empowering learners to develop their own questions and then use an array of resources to process and share new knowledge or demonstrating an understanding of concepts are critical if ownership is the goal.  The article from WNET explains why this is so important:

Effective inquiry is more than just asking questions. A complex process is involved when individuals attempt to convert information and data into useful knowledge. A useful application of inquiry learning involves several factors: a context for questions, a framework for questions, a focus on questions, and different levels of questions. Well-designed inquiry learning produces knowledge formation that can be widely applied.

Ownership through inquiry is not as difficult as you might think if there is a common vision, language, expectation, and a commitment to student agency.  The Rigor Relevance Framework represents a simple process to help educators and learners scaffold questions as part of the inquiry process while empowering kids to demonstrate understanding aligned with relevant contexts.  By taking a critical lens to instructional design, improvement can happen now. Curiosity and passion reside in all learners.  Inquiry can be used to tap into both of these elements and in the process, students will be empowered to own their learning. 

Critical Thinking in the 21st Century and Beyond

One of my fondest memories of school was my science teacher, Mr. South. Having attended a K-8 consolidated school in rural NJ, we knew who all the teachers were.  However, Mr. South stood out.  I remember an elementary student seeing paper flyers with a caricature of Mr. South wearing one of his famous flannel shirts. As the years passed, he transitioned from flannel to a dress shirt, tie, and jeans.  He was stylish in the sense that he always got students and staff alike to talk about what he was wearing over the years.

There was a reason why everyone talked about Mr. South. He was an amazing teacher. Every student in the school could not wait to take his class.  Since our school was small, there was a chance you could even have him multiple times before moving up to the high school.  What separated Mr. South from his peers was his passion for helping students learn and love the sciences.  His lessons were light on direct instruction and heavy on authentic connections and application. He didn’t teach science. We learned science.

All of his classes were amazing.  He is the main reason I pursued a degree in science initially, before taking this passion to the field of education. There was one project in particular that has stuck with me to this day.  Instead of lecturing to us about Mars he had us actually create Mars in the classroom. Students were broken up into teacher-selected groups that had different tasks to complete. The specific task of each group played a larger part in the Martian project.  My partner and I were tasked with getting materials to Mars in order to create an infrastructure on the planet.  Through our research we came across a device called the mass driver.  We presented our finding to Mr. South and he gave us the tasks of creating 2 different working mass driver prototypes

During school and after school, my partner and I worked on developing these miniature prototypes that would actually propel mass.  This was certainly a frustrating experience, as we were never really asked to learn like this before.  Countless hours were spent outside of school working on this project. We even went to Mr. South’s house on weekends so that we could use the many different tools he had in his garage.  Through it all we owned our learning by being engaged in thoughtful work and made numerous connections to other disciplines. The process in itself was fraught with highs and lows, but in the end we developed the two working prototypes as assigned while learning with our hands.  

Over a period of a couple of weeks each group worked to complete their assigned tasks.  The final step was then to actually create Mars in the classroom and that is what Mr. South had us do. It was controlled learning chaos that involved tools, wood, paper mache, collaboration, communication, black lights, and so much more.  When thinking of makerspaces today, our learning experience in his class was one connected to the guiding principles of the maker movement.  Once the surface of Mars was completed each group set up stations throughout the planet to present their specific projects.  The culminating activity was a multi-night presentation to parents and the greater community where each group showed off a thriving community would hypothetically be created on Mars. 

This was by far one of the most powerful learning experiences I ever engaged in as a student.  Mr. South had us actively learn science instead of just taking notes and then a traditional assessment.  It was relevant, meaningful, and fun. Real-world predictable and unpredictable problems were tackled.  We developed the competence to think in complex ways and to apply knowledge and skills. Even when faced with perplexing unknowns, the pedagogy employed by Mr. South allowed us to use extensive knowledge and skills we didn’t know we had to create solutions and take action to further develop skills and knowledge. At ICLE this is what we call a Quad D learning activity.  

Many of the 21st Century skills that are emphasized today were evident in the project that took place in 1988.  It is not that this type of learning is new. Heck, everything we see and hear for the most part is not new.  What has changed is how technology provides a new avenue to actively integrate this type of learning in ways that many of us could never have imagined.  The key is to focus on project-based and authentic inquiry. Taking the example I presented from my schooling consider the following elements and the ubiquitous role technology should play:

• Driving question or challenge
• Need to know
• Inquiry and innovation
• 21st Century skills
• Student agency
• Feedback and revision
• Publicly presented project

These elements, when aligned with sound pedagogy, can provide students with the types of learning opportunities that they will carry with them no matter what path they choose.  

Raising the Bar on Learning

In my opinion inquiry-based learning is one of the best pedagogical techniques available to teachers.  When activities are developed appropriately students are afforded the opportunity to construct new knowledge through exploration, problem solving, developing then answering their own questions, application, and trial & error. This technique typically makes students uncomfortable at first as they have become so conditioned by our traditional culture of education where they would rather be spoon-fed information instead of having to think. Not only do students fight this technique at first, but so do parents.  This stems from the fact that many parents want their children taught the same way they were.  I have engaged in numerous conversations over the past two years with parents explaining how the inquiry-based process for learning will much better prepare their children for success in the future. It is a conversation that I relish as the students themselves ultimately discover the value of this type of learning over traditional pedagogical techniques that are mostly passive in nature and do not require critical thought. 

Image credit: http://www.inquirylearn.com/inquirydiagram.jpg

New Milford High School teacher Mrs. Chowdury has evolved into a master teacher in this approach and here is why. Physics is often thought to be a fun subject where students get to perform exciting experiments. Mrs. Chowdhury has a teaching philosophy that her students cannot engage in fun activities simply for the sake of having fun, but the activities have to trail or follow difficult calculations. When Mrs. Chowdhury’s students found out that she had some Nerf guns in the classroom, they wanted to play with them. So she created an assignment that involved Nerf guns where students had to apply their understanding of energy concepts to figure out the velocity of the bullet as it was leaving the gun. 

She gave the students a meter stick, a protractor with a string attached from the center, and a Nerf gun with one bullet. The students’ task was to design how they wanted to set up and use the materials to be able to calculate the starting velocity of the bullet. The students chose to use the protractor to figure out how high the bullet went and from there use energy concepts to calculate the velocity. When it comes to learning there should never be an easy way out. Making the process fun and engaging while invoking problem solving and critical thinking skills epitomizes the type of learning our students need and deserve. 

Inquiry vs. Memorization

Memorization often gets in the way of learning and yet the practice continues unobstructed in schools.  Fortunately the sciences provide schools and educators with many natural opportunities to move away from the boring, meaningless task of memorizing facts and information to a more constructivist approach associated with inquiry-based learning. Recently Ms Chowdhury’s Consumer Chemistry classes conducted testing on various consumer products as related to chemistry topics. While the students were learning about acids and bases, they had played with a simulation where their task was to create solutions of different pH. They also worked with another simulation that demonstrated acids and bases at a molecular level. 

Image credit: http://adaptedinnovation.blogspot.com/2013/04/inquiry-and-project-based-learning-in.html

Based on their learning from the two simulations, with the facilitation of Ms Chowdhury, the students discussed about a design for testing different brands of antacids. They knew they needed a sample acid and a pH indicator. The students were given lemon juice as acid, grape juice as base and they had three brands of antacid (Equate regular strength, Equate maximum strength, and Rolaids). The students used the idea that the grape juice (pH indicator) will change color when enough of the antacid has been added to neutralize the acid. They recorded the number of drops used from each brand of antacid, and decided on Rolaids being the best among the three based on their results. 

Ms Chowdhury believes that experiments such as this helps students contextualize their learning at a more practical level rather than mere memorization of what acids and bases are. The students also thoroughly enjoy any hands on activities. Regardless of the level of the course high school students today need to think. Memorization of facts does now allow for students to truly grasp concepts, let alone apply and then demonstrate mastery. Science is primed for inquiry-based learning, but schools need to do more by promoting this pedagogical technique across all content areas. 

Inquiry-Based, Constructivist Learning in Physics

Every year New Milford High School teacher Tahreen Chowdhury teaches Newton’s laws of physics and most of the students are able to grasp the first and the second law. However, Newton’s third law is the one that is most contrary to their everyday intuition. This law, as the students know it, is “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. The students have learned this concept since their first science classes, but are puzzled by this concept when they see small cars being demolished by bigger SUV’s. 

Image credit: http://nancyrubin.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/learn_istock_000017123843xsmall.jpg

So this year, Mrs. Chowdhury decided to take a different approach to teaching this law in physics. The lesson started with Mrs. Chowdhury having two students pull on each other with spring scales. She asked the students to pull so that the two spring scales read different forces. The students were unable to do so, each time one pulled with a certain force, the other spring scale read the same force. Normally, students agree when Mrs. Chowdhury says that pulling with the spring scales attached and pulling hand to hand are the same except spring scales just reads the strength of the pull. This year, the students completely disagreed and said that using the spring scales make the forces the same. So Mrs. Chowdhury decided to use the Vernier Force Sensors. She set up an air track and two carts with motion sensors attached to them. She asked the students to come up with different collisions and predict how the forces will compare to each other based on the collisions. The students changed the carts’ mass and velocity so the collisions were different. 

In the end, they saw on the force sensor software that the readings were identical from the two sensors. One student summarized their learning from that lesson as “when two things collide with each other, they exert the same force on each other regardless of their mass and how fast they are coming at each other”. Below is a screenshot of the convincing data of two students pulling on the force probes from two different directions, each time the measured forces were identical regardless of who pulled harder. Mrs. Chowdhury believes that this year the students have a much better understanding of Newton’s third law instead of mere memorization of the phrase “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”.  

Investigative Science

NMHS science teacher Ms Tahreen Chowdhury taught the work-energy unit through investigative science learning process. The students started off the unit smashing pieces of chalk using different methods such as a wood block, rolling cart and sling shot.  From this activity students developed the idea that a system of objects can have different types of chalk smashing ability based on their location, speed, and stretch/compressibility. 

Image credit: http://www.vrml.k12.la.us/1st/homework/science/science1un3.htm

Once the students related all the experiments to an objects’ ability to do something (i.e. smash chalk or make the touching surfaces of two objects in a system warm), Ms Chowdhury introduced their scientific terms of gravitational potential energy, kinetic energy, spring/elastic energy, and internal energy. Ms Chowdhury encouraged the students to develop their own names for these energies so they internalize the meaning better. Some of the names that the students developed were Apollo (gravitational potential energy), Sonic (kinetic energy), Elastigirl (spring/elastic energy), and Charmandar (internal energy). 

Then with the students assisting, Ms Chowdhury introduced the equations that represent each of the energies and took them through activities that helped the students developed the work-energy conservation theorem. To top it all off, Ms Chowdhury had a roller coaster building project for the students. Their task was to build a roller coaster for a marble with one loop and two humps; they were also required to utilize their knowledge of work-energy to find the speed of the marble at any three locations on the track. The students put together Prezi presentations that walk viewers through the building process and how the concept of energy is related to building a functioning roller coaster. 

You can view on the of the Prezi's that the students created HERE.