Inquiry - reflections.

Why look at Inquiry Based Learning? For Coley Street School and their journey, they had found that the children were switched off to learning and therefore change WAS necessary. 

For Levin North, we want to enhance learning and teaching through ICT, Inquiry and Student Engagement.HOW? - good question. This is a huge area that we are working on to ensure that our journey (students and teachers) is achievable and successful for all concerned and that we will grow together, with a shared vision. As a staff - this is our journey, we all need to take ownership and contribute, so that we can learn together, critically reflect, have support for and with one another, taking our time, using our professional development wisely, becoming aware of the tools available, ensuring student Engagement, as well as allowing for innovation. Watch this space.

My children are highly enthusiastic about asking  their own questions and finding the answers. The next step for me is to find more resources for the children to use that are appropriate to their skill level. I will be asking my ICT lead teacher/Mentor or hep with finding  websites and using Comic Life to display data.

Inquiry learning journey

We believe that it fits well with the new curriculum and is the best way for children to gain skills to become lifelong learners. It also ensures that children have involvement and ownership of their learning, thus enhancing student engagement. This year, we are exploring a variety of approaches to inquiry with a view to forming a model suitable for our school by the end of the year. The staff will be given some readings to ignite their understanding. Our term by term integrated units (schoolwide) are being adapted and tailored to encourage more of a student-driven, inquiry based model for learning, rather than teachers choosing a topic as was done in the past. For example, in term 2, our unit is What If... leaving the opportunity for syndicates, classes or groups to select what they are learning about and their main and subsidiary questions. We are currently working out how best to implement a schoolwide inquiry model, especially whether we go through a full process of the whole staff developing the model or our inquiry team devising a model which will be trialled for a year. We are learning from visiting other schools, taking inquiry workshops at conferences and investigating various models. Whichever way we choose, we would like to take on an inquiry model from the beginning of next year. So far, the main implication for staff has been the change of approach in our units and this change is being supported through syndicates working together and discussing how teachers are handling this new approach in their classrooms.

There is an  interesting article in the 5 May Gazette that talks about what a group of Otago schools are doing in terms of "enhanced teaching of inquiry learning". (Page 11 of the Gazette)

"everybody's rising to the lift of each other's work and student achievement rises as a consequence". It's that concept of everyone working together in a collaborative environment -something that we are working towards here.

As we progress along our Inquiry journey it is exciting to see teachers moving outside their comfort zone and giving more power to the learner! You can feel the buzz as teachers progress in this direction.