I Is for Inquiry: An Illustrated ABC of Inquiry-Based Instruction for Elementary Teachers and Schools

By Bruce Shore, Mark W Aulls, Diana Tabatabai and Juss Kaur Magon

I Is for Inquiry takes a unique approach to helping teachers in the elementary grades create lessons and sustain inquiry in their classrooms. This colorful, illustrated alphabet book explores 26 (including X and Z) key ideas and skills in inquiry-based teaching and learning, such as collaboration, dialogue, evidence, hypothesis, and scaffolding. Each short chapter:

• Summarizes one inquiry element that can be built into students' experiences.
• Uses straightforward language and examples.
• Includes a classroom vignette and suggestions for using the concept.
• Shares selected references and related Internet-based resources.
• Helps teachers build self-confidence about teaching through inquiry.

This book will serve as a familiar and fun resource for busy teachers at any point in their careers. Using the inquiry vocabulary and repertoire of concepts, teachers can build curriculum and share ideas with colleagues, making inquiry in the classroom as approachable as ABC!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Aug 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781618219893

Book preview

A is for Activity

Learning is more effective and motivating when students are active and engaged rather than passive. An activity has a learning goal or outcome, directions for what students should do and why, and a tangible product that is sometimes formally evaluated. Inquiry activities are of three kinds:

1. Social collaboration: Includes making instructional decisions with the teacher, choosing with peers, teamwork, dialoguing, and collaborating.

2. Engagement in the inquiry process: Includes finding and answering questions; collecting data by reading, observing, and writing; interpreting data; presenting findings; and learning from others.

3. Cognitive strategies: Include brainstorming, identifying topics and main ideas, categorizing and classifying concepts and ideas, note-taking, summarizing, asking higher order questions, and evaluating.

Making Activity Happen

We chose to emphasize one particular, powerful activity that can be repeatedly used to engage a class in initiating the inquiry process: brainstorming. Other chapters in this book present numerous options for activities, from negotiating to questioning to sharing.

All inquiry requires discovering what one already knows about the general inquiry topic or question. Brainstorming helps model this process. The topic can be based on a curriculum unit theme or a previous topic in any subject in which students demonstrate interest. The teacher announces the topic and asks the class to free-associate everything that comes to mind about the topic. Learners need assurance that free association means anything goes. Model free association by thinking aloud and inviting students to help, which allows students to become more aware of the meaning of a topic or concept by bringing to mind words, phrases, and ideas. Students can find out how much the class together seems to know, who knows what, and how the words and ideas they already know might be connected. They can also reflect on what they might want to know more about. Brainstorming then focuses on building a shared understanding from which a central question emerges, which students will answer by searching for more information.

In primary and intermediate grades, the teacher writes the topic and records what students suggest on chart paper or a SMART Board, flipchart, blackboard, or projector. Recording must be rapid, and repeating contributions aloud allows students to check that what the teacher records is what they intended. This honors each contributor. Some paraphrasing of original free associations can help when a student is slightly off target. For example, teachers might ask, Did you mean to say __________? Could we say this another way?—but we should not overdo this in order to keep all students’ attention.

Once the contributions of new ideas subside, teachers can ask the class to identify the most important or most general words, or ideas that other words in the list elaborate, so teachers can then put the students in groups. Sometimes grouping students with their friends (as long as no one is left out) might be more effective, possibly because these groupings allow criticism and are safer, and power relationships are less critical. Teachers can guide students to eliminate words that are irrelevant to the general topic or synonymous with another. Groups can then share their conclusions.

Brainstorming facilitates individual students relating existing knowledge to new knowledge on their own in order to start an investigation on a topic, learn more about a familiar topic, or generate a question to systematically investigate. At any grade level, initially explain the brainstorming goal and steps, and then work collaboratively. Eventually this routine helps all students internalize the steps and feel confident about brainstorming alone or with