Teacher Learning Community

Fall 2018 TLC: Empowering Student Thinking - Activity 2 Anchor Resources

Course leader:
SEED Team

Teacher Quality Standards

  • QS I: Teachers demonstrate mastery of and pedagogical expertise in the content they teach.
    • Element C: Teachers demonstrate knowledge of the content, central concepts, inquiry, appropriate evidence-based instructional practices, and specialized characteristics of the disciplines being taught.
  • QS III: Teachers plan and deliver effective instruction and create an environment that facilitates learning for their students.
    • Element C: Teachers integrate and utilize appropriate available technology to engage students in authentic learning experiences.

Creating a Culture of Inquiry

In this activity, you will explore the ways teachers can intentionally plan experiences and design tasks that create an inquiry mindset. The resources will encourage you to consider new ways for students to question and construct meaning about the things they are learning.

 

Resources

Inquiry-Based Instruction Explores, Then Explains

This article extrapolates on the 4 Es model and helps us to understand the importance of the order of tasks in an inquiry model. It also provides some classroom examples.

 

How to Reinvent Project Based Learning

This article outlines how project-based learning supports inquiry and how to shift some of your practices to support deep learning for students.

 

What is Inquiry?

This resource helps clarify the definition of inquiry, not as an event or method, but more of a mindset.

 

The 5-Step Inquiry Lesson Plan

This article provides a lesson plan framework for inquiry learning.

 

Levels of Inquiry Maths

This tool provides teachers with an understanding of how inquiry can be scaffolded in different ways depending on the profile of your class's experience and initiative. The end goal is to allow students to engage in open-ended inquiry, but it can take months of work to get them there and this resource walks you through the different stages. Although this resource is specific to math, the levels of inquiry are applicable across many content areas.

John Hattie on Inquiry-Based Learning

In Hattie’s research on effective practices in education, he found that inquiry-based learning has a relatively small effect size. In this video, he discusses his ideas about why this might be the case.