WEEK 2

WEEK 2 POST

The image above (http://route21.p21.org/) helps to illustrate how inquiry based learning can be used to develop the essential skills required for success in the 21st century.  This week, or readings focused on the components necessary for establishing a highly effective inquiry based learning classroom environment. When done so effectively, these components establish a community.  During this week our topics addressed how to successfully build such a community within the classroom setting.  At the heart of inquiry based learning is the essential component in the process that requires students to feel empowered, and allowed to share ideas, thoughts and feelings.

Perhaps the most influential information shared through the course readings this week were the abilities necessary to do inquiry and the understandings about inquiry.  Each of the two categories are below with a short explanation shared in the course content section if the class readings.
Abilities Necessary to Do Inquiry

• Identify questions that can be answered through investigations.
• Design and conduct an investigation.
• Use appropriate tools and techniques to gather, analyze, and interpret data.
• Develop descriptions, explanations, predictions, and models using evidence.
• Think critically and logically to make relationships between evidence and explanations.
• Recognize and analyze alternative explanations and predictions.
• Communicate procedures and explanations.

Understandings About Inquiry

• Different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of investigations.
• Current knowledge and understanding guide investigations.
• Technology used to gather data enhances accuracy and allows us to analyze and quantify results of investigations.
• Explanations emphasize evidence, have logically consistent arguments, and use principles, models, and theories.
• New knowledge advances through legitimate skepticism.
• Investigations sometimes result in new ideas and phenomena for study, generate new methods or procedures for an investigation, or develop new technologies.

I also learned that about process skills that are associated with inquiry based learning (observing, questioning, planning and investigating, formulating explanations, making predictions, analyzing data, and communicating) have often been thought of and referred to as "soft skills." These very skills are the skills employers deem essential to students' future success.  However, often time, these skills rarely acknowledged in a typical curriculum.  However, these skills can be promoted through the use of inquiry based learning activities.