I’ve learned that there are different levels of inquiry, from guided and structured inquiry to free inquiry. Coming into the course, I assumed that all inquiry was free inquiry.

Now I realize that students must learn to work within the inquiry approach, within a structured activity, before they will be ready to take on more free inquiry. Take a K-12 science curriculum, for example. Students complete many structured lab experiments and complete many structured lab reports. Even when students choose their own topics of interest and compete in a science fair competition, there are guidelines and processes they must follow in order to participate.

As an English teacher, I can relate these conventions of scientific inquiry to the conventions of writing we teach, or to the conventions of citing and quoting others’ work in a research assignment. Students must practice with these conventions before they learn to work within them in order to create more credible work.

I was pleased in the course to revisit the principles of backward design, as I had studied them a few years ago in a previous graduate course. I find that beginning with the end in mind is an important approach to planning anything, from assessments and learning activities to a schedule for a busy weekend. UBD principles helped me through the experimentation of my first couple years in the classroom. Now, I’ll lean on them again as I experiment with increasing the amount of 5E activities and inquiry in my classroom.

The 5Es – Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaboration, and Evaluation – are each elements that any good teacher values in his learning activities. They are simple and straight-forward … and yet, the BSCS lesson planning template is one of the most confusing documents I’ve encountered since I first filed my own taxes. Upon completing a lesson on this template, I realized that this template includes spaces for the questions we will address to students and spaces for teachers’ answers to questions posed of us.

Just like a good learning activity, the planning of the 5E BSCS activity is a process, complete with questioning and opportunities to connect various ideas. It’s a process that is not only beneficial for science classrooms, but for any classroom where the 5Es are valued as worthy goals and essential for deeper learning.

When it comes down to it, other than inquiry learning activities that are specifically focused on literature, genres, or writing skills, English standards and skills can be applied to any inquiry activity. At some point in the process (hopefully throughout the process), it is time to communicate. An inquiry activity is fertile ground for both formative assessment and summative assessment, by both students and teachers, so communication plays a major roll in successful inquiry, no matter the subject area or topic of study.

The scientific explanation sounds like it should be so rigid and structured, but it’s really no different than what we ask students to do each time they create expository writing. Answer the question, provide evidence, and then explain the evidence and how it truly corroborates with your answer. It’s not rocket science, if students put some thought into what they’re communicating, and stay focused on their audiences and purposes of writing.

As we head into the final two weeks of the course, I’m excited to start applying what I’ve learned and begin to make inquiry happen in my own classroom.

I entered the course thinking inquiry had to be open, with students each moving in his own direction while the teacher scrambles around trying to keep up with the students. I pictured a vibrant classroom where students were exploring their interests, with a teacher checking progress to keep them within the scope of the subject area.

The impression I have now of inquiry is that it has varying levels of structure. Younger students and students who are learning to inquire and investigate  would likely benefit most from structured, teacher-centered inquiry at first. It seems to me that most inquiry activities are either structured or guided inquiry, through which students do the exploring with some level of scaffolding provided by the teacher.

Open inquiry seems to be the reserve of students and classrooms where there is a high level of trust and autonomy for students. This can only be developed by experience, and is most smoothly developed through structured and guided experiences.

The ultimate goal of inquiry is inquiry … that is to say that by building up students’ abilities to investigate independently, the students will be more productive and successful college students and adult citizens, when inquiry skills are really survival and success skills.

This particular science teacher was facilitating an inquiry activity about optics and vision. He started with an activity with candles reflecting light off of spoons (concave and convex sides) as mirrors, then progressed to lenses, eventually adding in the mathematical equations that govern optics. It was intriguing that he was able to bring students to understandings of complex concepts without spoon feeding them any answers. When he did provide answers and examples, students were so raptly engaged in the material that they had no trouble grasping concepts, or at least asking great questions to further clarify.

Science seems to be an obvious arena for this type of activity. Everything should be investigative and a good science teacher should be able to design lab activities that connect to the mathematic and scientific principles that the teacher wants students to learn. In an English classroom, I still struggle with exactly how to use this teaching/facilitating technique. I can see its utility, but I’m struggling with arriving on a practical example.

Perhaps the answer lies less in trying to make my subject fit with inquiry, but more in trying to make learning activities more authentic, and then using students’ curiosity about the real world to drive inquiry into the subject area. I hope our course materials, or our classroom discussions, will help me make this connection within the next few weeks.

After these first few weeks, I have a solid grasp on what inquiry is and why I’d want to use it in my classroom, but I’m definitely on shakier ground when it comes to the HOW and WHEN of inquiry. These are my “burning questions” in week two of the course.

• How do I ensure that each student/group chooses/formulates questions that are both challenging and realistic while being both appropriate and on-topic?
• How do I ensure that students have the skills to investigate? What if they know how to research in an appropriate way, but choose an easier path?
• What should be graded? Is is appropriate to do graded checkpoints, providing a rubric for each step of the process, or is that controlling the process too much?

I wonder about these things because I imagine some students finding this open process to be difficult to adjust to, as some prefer strictures to guide their work so that they know they’re succeeding. Other students may find an open process easy to take advantage of, pulling on each loophole, as in “you didn’t say my question had to be challenging” or “I just couldn’t come up with a question that was challenging” or “I looked at that resource and decided it was too hard.”

I suspect many of these questions will be answered over the next five weeks of the course. I’m looking forward to learning how to apply this interesting pedagogy to my teaching.

The questions and doubts I harbor follow.

• How do I get the kids to have burning questions about my subject area?
• What if the kids refuse to engage in questioning?
• What if the kids all have disparate questions that require such different types of investigations that I’m stretch too thin to effective help them inquire?
• What if the answers are difficult to grasp, making it impossible to produce tangible results from the process?
• Is there time in the academic schedule for this?

I feel as if I’m beginning to grasp this a bit more, thanks mostly to this page that details the inquiry process as ask, investigate, create, discuss, and reflect. In other words, inquiry is just using students’ curiosity as the basis for their learning and creating. At the “end” of the process, the reflection should provoke further inquiry.

It’s a great concept; one that I hope to learn more about throughout this course.

I am self-assessing my cell phone digital story, posted here: http://adamswriting.com/learning/?p=147.

According to the rubric, I’d score as follows.

Point of View/Purpose 20 points – “Establishes a purpose early on and maintains a clear focus throughout.”

Voice/Pacing 15 points – “Occasionally speaks too fast or too slowly for the story line. The pacing (rhythm and voice punctuation) is relatively engaging for the audience.”

Images 20 points – “Images create a distinct atmosphere or tone that matches different parts of the story. The images may communicate symbolism and/or metaphors.”

Economy 15 points – “The story is told with exactly the right amount of detail throughout. It does not seem too short nor does it seem too long.”

Grammar 20 points – “Grammar and usage were correct (for the dialect chosen) and contributed to clarity, style and character development.”

I would take off points in “voice/pacing” and “economy,” because my digital story speeds up a little at the end. Watching it now, I would like the ending to maintain the same pacing throughout the video.

I would award this work top marks in “point of view/purpose,” “images,” and “grammar,” because these were the video’s strong points. The rubric’s description of these criteria closely match the product in question.

Evaluating the Rubric

This rubric is an excellent starting point for a digital story rubric. Here are some concerns I have about this rubric, in regards to assessing student digital stories. I would fix these before using this with my students.

• The “images” criterion has no quality measurement. Many students choose images that are too small (resolution-wise) for video compression. They appear blurry or pixelated. This should be a part of the images section.
• There is no inclusion of music/sound effects quality, appropriateness, volume, timing, or otherwise.
• Other than “purpose/point of view,” there is no metric for the effectiveness of the story, or fidelity to the conventions of storytelling.

adams_u06a2_cellphoneDST

I also explored a few of the recorded shows this week, including Seedlings and Teachers Teaching Teachers. The show I listened to in its entirety, and enjoyed the most, was the K12 Virtual LAN Party. The show is described at EdTechTalk.com as follows: “Kathy Cassidy is a grade one teacher at Westmount School in Moose Jaw, SK, Canada.  In the winter of 2008, Patrick Lewis’s university class of pre-service teachers were blogging mentors for Kathy’s grade one students. This presentation talks about that collaboration and the results of the research that was conducted about the effect this mentorship had on the students’ writing.”

The strengths of the show format were that the facilitators switched back and forth between text chat, a prepared video (that was well done) about the student-to-student blogging buddy project, and the Skype audio of the show’s facilitators and guests. The combination of Skype and text chat allowed for more participants, and modes of participation. Also, the text chat provided backup for when the video had a glich in it that required re-cueing.

The weakness of the format was that a viewer could not see the hosts and guests, other than when they appeared in the video. It would have been better to see those who were speaking instead of just the text chat, but that’s the nature of the virtual LAN party.

This show was very interesting. I would participate in future shows of this nature, especially if it meant learning more about ideas like Kathy Cassidy’s, which could have similar applications in my classes. Any new ideas, and the chance to discuss them with their creators, would be great.

This type of webcast, specifically the virtual LAN party, would require some skills and software to pull off, but I could see it working well to connect students in distant classrooms (on similar or same time zones) with other students or mentors, like the blogging in Cassidy’s project allowed. It could also be used to connect students in multiple classrooms with expert guests who were willing to participate.

I could see this working to connect my classroom with classrooms of former co-workers at my past school. I do a lot of career research, and my former school was a technical high school, so my current students could be connected with either past students or students who now attend my former school. Current students could discuss the careers that they are interested in and the tech school students could share some of their experiences studying and practicing in those fields.