Inquiry Based Instruction: AEE 412 Weekly Writing #9

This is what we want to avoid by using
strategies like Inquiry Based Instruction.

Inquiry Based Instruction focuses on making your students the real directors of their learning. While the Problem Solving Approach allowed students more ownership of their learning, the Inquiry Based Instruction teaching technique takes it one step further and has the students in charge of the content delivered and the delivery method (depending on the implementation, and the constraints set by the teacher). Inquiry Based Instruction relies on and fosters high levels of student engagement and provides opportunities for teachers to incorporate other subjects into their classroom, enhancing their students' reading, math and science skills.

Based on the scientific method, Inquiry Based Instruction utilizes 6 stages of the Inquiry Cycle: 1) Inquisition, 2) Acquisition, 3) Supposition, 4) Implementation, 5) Summation, and 6) Exhibition. Students can move through this cycle several times depending on the content taught and the delivery method chosen, and it makes them engaged in each part of the learning, from deciding what they will be learning (the question they will inquire), brainstorming how they will acquire the knowledge/solution needed for the situation, the planning and implementing of an experiment, and developing and sharing their findings.

Since there is no one correct way to incorporate Inquiry Based Instruction into your classroom, there are many different methods for implementing it into your classroom, but the commonality among all the methods is the importance of student engagement. On paper, Inquiry Based Instruction lessons may appear unstructured, and this can be true, which is also why some teachers may struggle with implementing this technique. While many teachers agree that Inquiry Based Instruction increases higher order thinking in their classroom and provides connections between their classes and their students' other core classes, it has the stigma of only being appropriate for advanced students. Due to the focus on moving towards higher order cognitive levels I can easily see where this stigma comes from, and I know that thinking about how I would incorporate this into my classroom, I struggle as to how I would prepare my students for this technique. But I believe that this is an important point - Inquiry Based Instruction is not just for advanced students, but there needs to be proper set up before between the teacher and students for it to be effective.

Need to make sure your students have the correct 
safety equipment when conducting wet labs!

To try and better prepare myself for attempting to implement Inquiry Based Instruction in my classroom, I attended two of the NAAE Teacher World workshops while at the National FFA Convention this past week in Louisville, KY. These workshops were sponsored by DuPont and facilitated by agricultural educators from across the country who have completed their National Agriscience Ambassador Academy.

My first workshop was "Chicken Little, Chicken Big" and taught how to determine the optimal, threshold, and detrimental levels of a substance using the scenario of feeding nutritional supplements to a flock of chickens. In this workshop, each of us (the students) were given a random sample of 10 chickens of a specific age out of a flock of 1000, and had to determine what the optimal, threshold, and detrimental levels of the supplement were based on the data we had on their growth rates each week. This activity teaches a student how to use given data points to determine the answer to a more abstract question before the answer is not necessarily important, but the reasoning behind the chosen answer and the process used to determine it are important (depending on the context this is being taught, if you are actually raising animals the correct answer would be important).

My second workshop was "Vet Detective: Tracking the Spread" and I really enjoyed this workshop and am excited to use a variation of it in my classroom this spring. This activity focused on determining which student had the original infected animal, Patient 0, based on the recorded interactions of all the animals found to be infected after a set number of interactions. I really like this because of the higher order thinking involved, the many variations it could be spun into, and also in the simplicity of its delivery. Each of the animals assigned to the students had its own scenario or biography and these could be utilized to varying degrees in the students' deductions of who was infected based on the teacher's level of questioning. The workshop provided the lab handout for the activity which included the materials needed and procedures utilized, but the teachers facilitating the workshop demonstrated several teaching strategies that I think can really increase the level of Inquiry in the lesson. While we (the students) were given the handout with procedures, we had to read it and then create pictorial versions of the procedures, which taps into the visual modality of learning and also requires students to analyze each step instead of just rote reading. They also had us develop our own data tables before showing us the example that we used during the workshop, which provides students the opportunity to decide what is the important data points you are looking for and the importance of labeling data.

Overall, while I am still nervous about developing my own Inquiry Based Instruction lesson plans and implementing it into my classroom, I can see the potential for all the different ways it can be utilized and how it can increase the amount of higher order cognitive learning I am using. I am looking forward to learning more about the topic this week and watching some Inquiry Based Instruction experts in action when we take our field trip to Greenwood High School.