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.