IBL Week 5

Over the last few weeks, I have found that inquiry based learning is more prevalent than I originally thought. I have started talking to my coworkers about it and seeing many lessons start to take shape in front of me. I am pretty excited to see inquiry based learning taking place, even if the teachers don't realize what they are doing!

At this point, I am working to put more inquiry into place in my classroom, even thought I teach Language Arts and inquiry is hard to put in place. I would like to create a cross curricular lesson with my teaching partners and add inquiry into all subject areas. A few things are brewing and I'm pretty excited to see where they take my class!

EDIM Week 3 Thoughts

As of the end of week 3 of my EDIM 513 course, I have developed more of an understanding of what inquiry based learning is, how it is developed, and the evolution of a IBL lesson. I have learned there are 3 different types of IBL lessons; teacher directed, teacher student shared, and student directed. In my opinion, at the elementary level, it is important to start with teacher directed inquiry with lots of support and a specific outcome in mind. While many students are curious, it is way too much to simply turn them loose with a strictly student directed IBL lesson right off the bat. Teachers and students need to know how to navigate the lesson and what types of questions to ask along the way. I also feel that if an IBL lesson is student directed, it is still important for the teacher to circulate around the room and be involved in what the students are doing. Checklists are a good way to keep students on task, and a teacher-student generated checklist is a good thing to have for students to refer to no matter what type of lesson they are doing. Inquiry based learning has a flow to it. Students do not simply jump from one thing to the next without a reason to do so. Each question that is asked and answered leads to another question until a final answer is achieved. As students become better at asking questions that are inquiry based, they can eventually move to more student directed inquiry lessons where the teacher becomes less of a leader and more of a facilitator.

One final thought would be that IBL is something that needs to begin at the beginning of the year, where students can be trained on things such as how to work in groups successfully, how to be a valuable member of a group, and what the expectations are for each type of learning. Because of this, I feel it may be too late to start IBL in my classroom this year, but I am definitely up for it next year.