Inquiry Based Instruction

Weekly Writing #9

This week is the perfect week to start discussing inquiry based learning because this past week two of my other classmates and I had the opportunity to go participate in a Pre-Service teacher workshop that was based on inquiry based instruction at National FFA Convention. We went through and discussed what inquiry-based instruction was and how to implement it into the classroom. Inquiry starts off with a question that is posed and in order to answer the question you use the scientific method to figure it out what the answer would be. Its great because it really gets your students to use a higher cognitive ability skills to figure out the answer to the question. However in order to make sure you are getting this type of teaching instruction you have to make sure that you are implementing and following the six steps of inquiry based instruction. The six steps of inquiry based instruction is: posing a question, investigating, using evidence to describe, explain, and predict possible solutions, connecting evidence to prior obtained knowledge, and lastly sharing your results. Also there are six steps in how to implement inquiry into the classroom they are the following: starting the inquiry process, promoting student dialog, transitioning between small groups and class discussions, clarifying misconceptions and developing student's understanding of the content, modeling the scientific process, and lastly utilizing student experiences to create new content knowledge. By following these steps and procedure you  as a teacher can implement inquiry into your classroom.
I have learned that inquiry based instruction is geared more towards student centered classes. It is important that you as the instructor are there as a guide to make sure the students are staying on track. Also by implementing this method you are making the students more accountable for staying on top of the work so that the process can continue on. There are many different ways or lessons you can use this type of instruction in. For example, Labs are the most commonly used ways of inquiry-based instruction.
I plan to implement this method into my classroom because it not only promotes organization for you as the teacher but the student as well by organizing their thoughts. In this workshop we learned about the use of notebooks in your class for labs especially. This was great because you could write down your findings in a certain lab and take notes so that your thoughts are more organized and make sense for you to go back and review. I really liked how they should and talked to us about the different lessons you could use for each part we did in the workshop. To show us how to utilize the notebooks with a lab we did the experiment of " Are Double stuf' Oreos Really Doubled Stuffed?". We reported our findings and came up with the conclusions that they are in fact double stuffed.  However I do not want to give to much out because on Monday in my methods class, my other classmates and I will be putting on a 40 minute presentation about what we learned.
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