C5: Guiding the Inquiry

by Lu Gerlach

Now that we are asking a variety of questions, what will we do with them?  In inquiry, we want students to explore their questions, test them out, make connections, and pose new questions. It is a continuous cycle of making questions, answering them, and generating new ones.  If students don’t have this opportunity to explore their wonderings, they miss important connections between content areas and becoming independent thinkers.  
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Is that not the role of school to prepare students for their future where they’ll work in a team to tackle challenging questions?    
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I remember when I began my PYP journey in a bilingual, interreligious, vegetarian school in Cologne, Germany, I  was overwhelmed by the volume of PYP verbiage that everyone was speaking.  It went over my head and I didn’t understand what people were talking about when they spoke of inquiry and concepts.  The training I attended gave you way too much information and it was difficult to decipher where to start.  This is why I wanted to focus this podcast on one thing at a time and scaffold the learning from beginning to end in one area.  I hope you have found some useful tips along the way. 

​If I were to begin learning about inquiry again, I’d start with the inquiry thinking strategies from podcast #2.  These help students to engage, challenge, find relevance, and make significant connections to their learning while giving you the structure you need as you are trying it out for the first time.  These strategies can help students to develop a sense of ownership of the learning experience, they can be used at any time during the unit, and they can be repeated routines that students can draw upon in their own work. 

When trying out inquiry for the first time, it can be unclear on where to start.  Here are stages of inquiry that can be explored: 

• Teacher-driven inquiry
• Modeled inquiry 
• ​Shared inquiry
• Student-driven inquiry

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What could this possibly look like?  Let’s take a deeper exploration of certain scenarios and try to match up the inquiry thinking strategies. You can use the inquiry thinking strategies in all the stages, but these are my recommendations based on the specific learning scenario.​

​No matter where you begin, the goal is to move towards student-driven inquiry.  This takes time, practice, and a strong sense of confidence before we can get there.  As educators, we need to be confident with the process and outcome before we can release it to our students.

 Another consideration, you can go through the different stages of inquiry in a single unit or a school year.  Take your time and don’t consider it a race compared to the class next to you.  It’s about building capacity in your students, nothing more.  

If you are a more visual person we will be having a 5 DAY INQUIRY CHALLENGE to walk through our guides. Join our Facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1177890089215736/

See you in our next episode
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Remember, hold on to that passion