Inquiry in MYP Physics

How can we make teaching and learning more student-centred?

Look at this ‘spectrum’ or 'continuum' for approaches to teaching and learning. I used this in a school workshop I ran recently around the idea of ‘student-centred learning.’

Where would you place yourself? Be honest!

Possibly the answer is ‘it depends’ and I think this is fair enough. We all change our approaches to teaching according to the situation and that is as it should be. The issues tend to arise when we have only one mode of operation in our classrooms and learning spaces.

I suggest that the IB guides are moving from the language of ‘student-centred learning’ and ‘differentiation’ to ‘collaborative learning’ and ‘personalisation’, which perhaps reflects a deeper paradigm-shift towards a diversification of approaches reflected for example in the interest around Universal Design for Learning and probably driven by the exigencies of hybrid and online learning that COVID-19 brought on many.

But here I will use ‘student-centred learning’ to denote any approach which starts with the student, rather than with the content. Inquiry-led learning is one model that ‘hardwires’ student-centredness in what we do.

What is inquiry-led learning?

The IBO identifies inquiry as one of its six fundamental pedagogical principles

Inquiry-based learning has been developed for a number of years by significant practitioners such as Kath Murdoch. The approach I'm calling inquiry-led learning is one where we frame the desired learning outcomes as questions, so that students always encounter knowledge as open-ended and open to (reasoned, informed) critique. No doubt you can see the ‘synergy’ and overlap here with critical thinking as a key AtL skill area.

As students ‘journey' through our units of inquiry they are hopefully stimulated to think this way about the knowledge they encounter, and to formulate their own questions.

To this end, all student activities in this site are structured using the simplest 3-stage inquiry cycle as it is presented by the IBO:

In the MYP units of inquiry are ‘framed’ (defined in scope) using inquiry questions that are factual, conceptual or debatable in form:

The nature of inquiry-led learning can vary in terms of the degree of teacher direction and structuring applied.

In this course, units of inquiry are structured because they prompt students to inquire to develop their understanding of certain learning objectives that are knowledge, skills, understanding or transfer-based. The learning activities sit somewhere between this and guided inquiries because they are generally tasks directed to a particular outcome. And occasionally - particularly in prompts for global context explorations or community engagement - students are given the ‘springboard’ for a more open inquiry.

The role of the teacher thus varies according to the stucture given to an inquiry. The resources on this site are written such that teachers operate more often as the ‘guide on the side’, although teachers will want sometimes to bring the class together for some direct instruction as ‘sage on the stage’^[1], also to generate discussion around the guiding questions so that the class can ‘crowd source’ their ideas for the inquiry questions. Remember that the site includes a ‘presentation mode’ if you wish to show pages on-screen in the classroom:

I make use of the Visible Thinking Routines from Harvard Graduate School for Education's Project Zero and you will see that each unit also contains various points where students are prompted to reflect on their learning - including a full unit reflection at the end of each unit of inquiry.

Footnotes

1. Alison King (1993) “From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side: College Teaching: Vol 41, No 1”​