Developing Inquiring Minds: Classroom Tour

Narrator: In this classroom, there's evidence of student thinking and learning. Their work is displayed along with anchor charts that show the evolution of their thinking. Every student's voice is valued. The inquiry process offers choice and considers the diverse needs and interests of all learners. It is learning that is driven by the student, although there is much planning and scaffolding provided by the teacher. Students work in a variety of groupings throughout the day and engage in talk and interaction with their peers and teacher. As students learn content and process, they also build a strong understanding of themselves as learners. A variety of resources is accessible to students for their individual inquiries. Learning intentions are posted, as are success criteria, to guide student learning. Teacher: We've been recording the students' questions as they are writing them in their Moon journals. They come up and we record them. We actually have three pages. So as we are learning about these things, we're recording them on our discoveries chart and we've found that some of our questions require even deeper thinking. So we've developed what the kids have now termed as an action plan, which is essentially their inquiry project. And the students have chosen different areas that they're particularly interested in and have created, created it into a project. The nature of an inquiry project is building on their own curiosities and what they're interested in. From all of this, I, or we, have been using the curriculum expectations to weave into their current inquiries, what they're naturally curious about, and we have written it in ways that are meaningful to the children. And as we discuss, I can draw or make reference back to our learning intentions, and so can the children. That, for example, the children are using different text types throughout the day. And then we can point that out to each other, that we used different text types for different purposes. And that's something that we have all around the room, is, you know, big books, nonfiction texts, poetry, fiction as well, all about the Moon, so that they can gather information from a variety of sources. And then in addition to print we also use technology in the classroom. The students would come to school every day and they would ask each other, you know, "Did you see the Moon?" And some would and some wouldn't. So it got me thinking about, "Well, how can I infuse math into this? Because they're asking questions." And so we started to think, "Let's graph our answers. Let's graph and see who saw it and who didn't." So the children, students, were taking a survey of how many people did and didn't see the Moon, and then we would graph that. And out of that actually came even deeper questions like, "Well, why did you see the Moon and I didn't?" you know? And actually, one of the questions was, well, a lot of children live near water. Is there some reason that the Moon is more visible over water? And another part of our Moon journals is some of the students started recording the temperature outside. And so then we thought, "Well, how can we graph that in a different way?" you know? We were learning about bar graphs and surveys, so what's a different type of graph? And we'd done a similar graph earlier in the year, so the students thought, "Why don't we graph the temperature in a plot type of format?" The students discussed the different ways that we could present the information and then the consensus was that we should form a plot graph like that. Several of the students have taken that even further in their Moon journals now, and each night, after viewing the Moon, they're going onto the Internet to find out what percentage of the Moon has been visible that night. Because the direction of this project is student led, a lot of the students have been coming in with different sources to support their studies. So we have one student who's particularly interested in the arts, and she brought in this amazing piece on, from Van Gogh, and she wants to learn how Van Gogh was able to paint the night sky in that way. And then, you know, we have other pieces of students just pulling off factual information about the Moon and the landing on the Moon. And students have even, one student has taken that information that, she did this at home one night, and found symbols of the Moon and brought that in to share. At the very beginning, one of the purposes of the Moon journal was to get the children to explore word choice. And we called, we called these treasure words and phrases; words that really created a picture in their minds. And each day, during the sharing, everyone would jot down words and phrases that they particularly liked from their peers and words that made a picture in their mind. So we've been jotting them down and not only from each other but also from the texts that we've been reading. Jotting down, and they can come up here and refer to them, and we also create our shared pieces of writing from these charts. Well, the value of having treasure words and phrases is just to make their writing richer, to create visual images in the readers' minds. It builds their vocabulary and helps them infuse that into not only their fiction writing but also into nonfiction writing, to give nonfiction writing voice as well. The rubric we generated as a class. I knew some of the areas that I wanted to focus on and I asked the children, "Well, what would that, what does 'voice' mean?" And so together we developed, you know, what would it be to have voice in your writing? So the children really know if their piece is effective. In my opinion, inquiry is an effective approach because it builds on the children's own curiosities and they're motivated to learn. Kids are just naturally, naturally question the world around them. They're curious. And so by me showing my genuine interest in their curiosities, they want to go off and explore the answers to those questions. I think inquiry is an effective approach for preparing kids for the 21st century because it makes them critical thinkers. They have to question what they read, question, question the world around them, and it develops their critical thinking abilities. It also helps them become problem solvers because they're working collaboratively in groups. They need to learn from each other, sometimes build upon each other's knowledge. They are developing information processing skills. The inquiry process allows them to explore in ways that are meaningful to them. So in my class we have students who want to draw and then they can learn through their drawing process more information. And one little girl said today that she draws and then that inspires her to write and ask questions and write more. We've built a rubric together. I knew what the curriculum expectations were that I wanted to cover, but the students and I developed our own language for, for that and developed a rubric from that.