Inquiry: Giving Students the Lead

This Week's Essential Question:
What is Inquiry Based Instruction?

Key Questions:
1) Why use Inquiry-Based Instruction?
Inquiry based instruction allows students to engage in real world scenarios. The students are trained or conditioned to become more self-motivated. The teacher provides guidance, however, it is the duty of the students to come up with a solution to the problem stated by the teacher.

2) How is Inquiry-Based Instruction different from Problems-Based?
The main difference between Inquiry-Based Instruction and Problems-Based is the amont of correct answers. Problems-Based has one clear cut answer to the problem at hand while Inquiry has multiple different solutions. However, IBI includes many of the components of Problems-Based such as questioning. Inquiry is heavily reliant on the students at times and therefore having guiding questions at least for yourself is helpful to allow students to get to the answer.

3) What are the key elements of Inquiry-Based Instruction?
There is no prescribed elements to inquiry-based instruction. Inquiry-based is not solely reliant on one criteria or one correct way. The chart used for inquiry-based instruction is a spectrum. It is important that us as pre-service teachers understand that it is okay for our lessons to not be all the way to the right of the chart. Mrs. Krista Pontius came to our AEE class last week and tried an inquiry lesson with us that she had recently wrote. One of the key things that I took away from her visit was that inquiry is often a lot more enjoyable than lecture for students. I also appreciated her comments that whenever she delivers a lesson, she thinks how she can make this lesson more inquiry-based in other words, how can she get the lesson further to the right of the chart.

Third Times The Charm

Holy smokes!
The weeks just keep on going and I'm not sure I can keep up!

October 22nd through the 27th were some of the most eye opening days for me as a future Agricultural Educator.

I travelled to Maryland on Monday, October 22nd to complete my life knowledge lesson (stay tuned for details on that!). Tuesday morning, bright and early we left to start out trek to Indianapolis, Indiana for the National FFA Convention and Expo.

Now I'm no stranger to this massive convention. I travelled to Louisville, Kentucky as a student for the National Convention in 2014. I also travelled to Indianapolis last year as an employee working for National FFA.

While all of these experiences required me to wear different hats much like Ag teachers do, this last one was the most memorable.

I travelled to Indianapolis with several other chapters near Boonsboro (my student teaching location). This trip was different though, there were two full coach busses full of students and teachers- something I'm not use to! (The other two trips I took were taken by vans with approximately 10 other people).

While at National Convention, we were able to experience a fascinating agritourism location- Fair Oaks Farm.

The students that we took, which were three girls who were all on the officer team, also participated in national days of service.

We jammed out to Garth Brooks and Easton Corbin and we listened to some of the National FFA Officers retiring addresses.

This trip to National Convention was one for the books. I was fortunate with three incredibly mature and responsible girls. They were able to be left alone for a majority of the time at national convention and were always on time, or even early to meet us where they needed to be.

I was able to get a glimpse of what it's like to be in charge of students in another state. Keeping track of the health forms for each student just in case something may come up. This trip really opened my eyes to how much the teachers need to be conscious of their students and their surroundings. When going to these events, you need to keep the students in mind as well as making sure that you are getting time for yourself to really dive into all of the professional development and teacher workshops that National FFA has to offer.