My Learning about Inquiry So Far

Yesterday, during my professional development day I took two different workshops on Inquiry.  I thought I would write about them to help synthesize my learning.

Both teachers presented the big problem at the beginning of their unit to excite the students. Adema Romano had a polar bear send a letter to the class about how difficult it is to find food for her and her cubs; the polar bear asks the class to help her.  Aleyna Golinsky wrote a newspaper article about a penguin that was found at a local pool.  They both, supplied books, watched videos and had lots of discussions about their learning.

 

Polar Bears

 

Adema used a text called Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action by S. Harvey & H. Daniels (2009) as a basis for her inquiry background.  She said that it was great but heavy reading.  The stages of inquiry were Immerse, Investigate, Coalesce and Go Public.

1. Immerse – The letter arrived and the class started looking for clues, making connections and asking questions.  They focused on a problem and brainstormed ways to help.
2. Investigate – They developed questions and began to research.  Adema had a grade one so she did have some readers in the classroom and didn’t need to do all the reading herself.  She recorded the class learning on posters and sometimes the children would have a smaller page that they could work on during choice time.  Eg. Adema drew a cross section of polar bear fur & skin to show the layers on a poster and then provided a regular paper with the drawing on it for the students to label.
3. Coalesce – Students continue with research but now have enough background knowledge to ask deeper questions and make connections.  The students decided to work on comparing polar bear teeth with alligator teeth (one student brought in an alligator tooth).  Students played polar bear at choice time, they worked on their learning at home and taught their parents. The class then made hypotheses about why the polar bears couldn’t find food.  They ended up learning about global warming when they discovered that there was a lot of garbage in the arctic and the ice cap is melting.  They brainstormed ways to help the polar bears and decided to stop polluting.
4. Go Public – The class wrote letters to the polar bear and told her about what they are doing to help her.  They cleaned the playground, turned off lights and the tap.  They educated their families.
   Adema’s students were then able to bring the way they learnt about the polar bears into other areas of learning throughout the year.
    
   Penguins
    
                           Aleyna used a book by Kath Murdoch and followed her inquiry model of Tuning In, Finding Out, Sorting Out, Going Further, Making Conclusions, and Taking Action. ( I gave up trying to find the title of her book, she does have a website that looks interesting and a blog.  It might be worth checking out.) Aleyna did do her presentation within these stages but not in a way that would make it easy for me to share them here so I just wrote about things that interested me.

• She started with the newspaper article about the penguins.  The penguin needed help to survive after being found at a pool.
• She preplanned her unit around the learning outcomes that she wanted to cover. 
• They brainstormed things that they knew about penguins. (I just learnt in another recent workshop that instead of What We Know About the poster can be What We Think We Know About.  This would prevent having penguins can dance on a chart recording what we know about penguins.)  Then they brainstormed questions they wanted answered. 
• Aleyna used books, power point presentations, YouTube, experiments, games and art projects to research penguins.  She does work in a school with kids that need a lot of support so she was the nucleus of the learning.
• Near the end of the unit the kids asked four deeper questions and the students worked in groups to answer them.  Each group discussed their answer and then drew/wrote what they thought.  They then glued their work onto a penguin silhouette to display their learning.
• Aleyna also used her grade three buddies to help with some learning and they made a paper-mache penguin.
  I found both workshops interesting and I will probably take a little from each. What I really liked was the structure they used to teach skills like questioning, recording, sharing of ideas, non-fiction book format, developing a hypothesis, and categorizing.