Tuesday, June 12, 2018

The Struggle is Real: Inquiry Roadblock


            One of my biggest struggles as an educator has always been time management within my classroom. I can never seem to fit everything I need to get done into my school day. When I plan great lessons, they always take longer than my allotted time frame to complete. As a result, another lesson has to be cut short or cut out entirely. Then I get behind in that content area and find it hard to catch back up.
            Because of my time management problem, I find it nearly impossible to include a lot of inquiry into my daily lessons. Inquiry has become an important part of our standards. I know it is important and I see the value in it, but how do I incorporate it into content lessons and still maintain a set instructional schedule?
            I have attempted full-on inquiry lessons on several occasions. For a while, I worked hard to create blended learning units using science and social studies content. Students selected their own research topic based on the standards, completed independent research, and worked with somebody that chose the same topic to create a final presentation to share with their classmates. For example, students could choose to research earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, or landslides for our natural disasters (fast processes) unit because those are the specific processes the standard requires students to know. They used books, encyclopedias, and Blendspaces I created to research their topics. Then they created a replica of their natural disaster (to make it STEM) and used some sort of technology presentation to share what they learned. The problem is the amount of time these blended learning projects took. (I should have prefaced this by stating that I teach third grade.) Third graders do not have much experience with research and struggle to find the information they need, paraphrase it, list the source, etc. My kids greatly enjoyed these projects, but they took a solid three weeks to complete. The other problem is that these projects only addressed one small part of a standard; the rest still had to be taught! I ended up running out of time to teach all of the content that my students needed to know.
            In addition to the time constraints, I know inquiry should be student-centered but I feel like teaching kids how to discover new material on their own requires a lot of teacher guidance. On top of figuring out how to create good inquiry lessons that involve science experiments and hands-on social studies activities, I would love to figure out how to add inquiry as a station in math (and of course reading). I just don’t know where to start!
So I guess my big question for all of you is, what do you do to include daily inquiry in your lessons? What are some examples of good inquiry lessons (in every subject) that you do regularly within your classroom? How do you manage the time needed to complete a good inquiry lesson? What are simple ways I can introduce inquiry to my students so that they can do it independently?
I would love to know your thoughts. I am open to any and all ideas! I think if I can figure out a good way to start, then I can use that to spark new ideas and new thinking in order to create the best possible lessons and learning experiences for my students.

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