Wednesday 6 February 2013

Inquiry-based learning

I followed a link via twitter the other day about enquiry-based learning. It got me thinking about how I approach this with my own classes.  The link quotes Chris Lehmann as he reflects on the successes of challenges with this approach in his Science Leadership Academy.  Lehman identifies 3 key steps to success:

(1) Defining the meaning of enquiry-basd learning
(2) The changes that signal a shift towards that approach
(3) Potential drawbacks
(1) Lehmann takes an interesting look at the notion of personalized of project based or even collaborative learning sessions - and asks whether they actually lead the students into a truly inquiry-based state of learning?  He talks about adaptive software that might lead students through topics at the own pace set by their own abilities - but that this software fails to ask students real-world questions about that material, or to contextualise is, or to communicate these concepts with others.  Similarly he criticises collaborative projects that are bound by strict guidelines, in which the end-products are more or less the same across different student groups.  Lehman is at pains to note that an inquiry-based approach pays little heed to HOW the learning happens, and is more concerned with encouraging students to learn even more - even if they and the teacher themselves don't know the answer.

This is the key - that often there is a blank page in which the teacher and the students do not know what will happen next.   There also should be some sort of ability to publish content, through e-portfolios, blogs, twitter, good old-fashioned printed or handwritten reports, video - anything that suits the content.
Potential obstacles to an enquiry-based learning approach are that lesson are necessarily a lot harder to plan, that covering key content is sometimes harder to plot, and that assessing student progress is not a simple case of ticking boxes or marking homework.  The very essence of assessment is called into question here - what is it that we are looking for when we assess students?  What should we be looking for?

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