Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Introducing Inquiry

We've spent some of today with Jan Thomas, our ICT facilitator from Coley Street School (and it was her birthday!). She showed us a model of how to implement inquiry learning in a school, including key considerations like whether to have whole school topics, thinking tools to use, what form of inquiry to use at different levels, whether to have a whole school model. The first step we need to take as a group is to learn more about inquiry ourselves by way of professional reading from the cluster blog and attending the upcoming cluster PD with Jan Marie Kellow the e-fellow (that rhymes!). Currently we have whole school broad topics that teachers are encouraged to pursue with their classes using some sort of inquiry/child centred approach. We look forward to the challenges ahead of tying inquiry in with our curriculum development programme.