An African Inquiry
Seekers bringing wonder and curiosity
Inquiry is at the heart of putting students in the driving seat of their own learning and developing their agency over their learning.. 'Inquirers' is one of the attribuites of the IB Learner Profile and the first of the IB approaches to teaching.
Inquiry-based learning has been the focus of my work with a whole school faculty - PYP | MYP | DP - in Botswana. They have at the heart of their mission and purpose as a school this wonderful mantra:
“We seek to bring wonder and curiosity to our students through an inquiry model of teaching and learning.”
This reminded me of what Warren Berger says in A more beautiful question - he calls it the Wondrous Circle. You find yourself in a state of wondering which leads you to curiosity, and then curiosity leads to questionning. So how do we create this wondrous cycle in our classrooms. Participants in the workshop came up with the following tips.
Teachers brainstormed the following list of top tips they need to bear in mind when planning inquiry-based learning.
- Agency: How are we going to make the learning student-led | agency | ensure that students are in the driving seat of their own learning?
- Process: Identify the process of learning: is it cognitive, affective or both? What are the specific skills to be developed?
- Plan teacher facilitation: What do we need to do as teachers to facilitate inquiry? (e.g. plan key questions | activities and strategies)
- Make learning activity led. What are the learning activities we will use? Are they varied enough to meet all learner needs? What about building up a toolkit of activities. What do we ask students to do as a result of wonder – curiosity – inquiry cycle?
- Questioning: Identify the BIGGEST question and related idea | concept driven questions. Create culture - instead of 'what did you learn today?' ask 'what good questions did you ask today?' Scaffold and value questioning - question starters, stems, strategies. Make questioning exciting – treat students as investigators | explorers
- Environment: How can the classroom environment support inquiry? Where am I as a teacher in this? Where are the students? Create the situation – plan learning experiences carefully so you create a scene (a situation) that will excite learning – it is a form of provocation.
- Provocation: How are we going to provoke curiosity? Is there a specific activity we can use?
- Teamwork: How do we build in learning through teamwork | partnership | collaboration? Team learning.
- Reflection: Build in reflection – it’s a way of inquiring and can encourage metacognition.
- Create the culture– consider protocols | culture. How do we establish a culture where questions are always welcome?
- Contextualise learning: how is it relevant | interesting | purposeful to student lives?
- Relevance: How do we make relevant to their future life | skills they will need? Always make links.
- Problem solving - frame learning with problems
- Metacognition: Encourage students to notice their learning - how we learn what we learn and how we can improve our learning. Learning is something the learner does - not what which is done to them - build learning power. Ask yourself WHY? - providing clear rationale for the learning
- Immerse in (research) project - student-based assignments - igniting curiosity
