Playing the Long Game: Teaching from an Inquiry Stance

Teaching and learning from an inquiry stance and the benefits it provides has long been an interest of mine, long before I was a teacher-librarian. As a classroom teacher I looked for ways to have my students co-creating their own learning through questioning, researching, problem-solving, design thinking and developing our success criteria. But unless you loop with your class (move with an entire group of students from one year to the next) you don't always get to see the progress the students make as they move on to the next grade.

As this is my second year in the Library Learning Commons and we have reached just about the halfway point (yeah for 100th Day of School!) I feel that I can start to make some observations about the students that I interact with frequently, either when their class comes to the LLC for collaboratively inquiry, those students who have joined the Silver Birch book club, those student who are starting to make frequent use of the Genius Cart and even just casual encounters with students tinkering and playing with the provocations in the LLC.

So far the biggest takeaway from teaching and learning from an inquiry stance is that it involves playing the long game. That is, the rewards come down the road and you have to be willing to be an active participant in the achieving the goals necessary for student success (e.g., 21st Century Competencies) which will take some time and some effort. Ensuring our students are prepared and able to be active participants in their society and to tackle the problems of our world is a long game. It's going take some time. It's not a "one and done" proposition. One can't "do inquiry" and then move on, that's just not how it works. If we expect our students to exhibit a growth mindset, to reiterate when they are solving problems, to be reflective and communicate about their struggles with achieving their goals, then we must also do these things.

Teaching from an inquiry stance is the ultimate iterative practice. 

This year I have had the opportunity to co-teach with a Grade 5 educator on two different occasions and for both of those we have been actively working with the students to co-create the inquiries and use their passions and curiosities to guide the learning. Which makes this co-teaching/co-learning situation unique is that she did loop with her class this year (most of her Grade 5 class were with her for Grade 4 last year when we also co-taught and collaborated together often) AND even more unique is that 5 of her students were in my class in Grade 3 the year before I moved into the teacher-librarian role. This means that these students are well practiced in the art of inquiry learning and have started to teach us a thing or two!

We are currently working on a guided inquiry of Black Canadian History. I say guided because I am also a big fan of Inquiry Mindset: Nurturing the Dreams, Wonders, and Curiosities of Our Youngest Learners by Trevor MacKenzie and Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt and in particular this sketchnote:

Trevor MacKenzie and Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt

We choose the topic- Black History but the students really took off with the inquiry. If you are interested in following along with our inquiry (and believe me, it's awesome!) just click here and visit the "Artifacts from Our Inquiry Process" page.

So what caused all this reflection on "nurturing an inquiry mindset" in students? Well, if I do say so myself I had just about the perfect day in the LLC. I had a class in this morning to read a Blue Spruce book and begin to explore a #makewriting activity that will branch into an art piece. Then the Grade 5 class I mentioned above visited to go deeper with our Canadian Black History inquiry. We are at the stage of starting to narrow down our focus after researching, asking questions, viewing videos as provocations, discussing, asking more questions, reading more articles, watching more videos... (you get the idea!) and after an amazing discussion last week where we asked the students what the end goal of our inquiry might be today we posed this question-

How might we share our learning?

And as well-prepared educators we had a small list (on a post it!) of ideas that the students might be interested in exploring to share their learning with world... however, the students had other plans. In a short 20 minute popcorn session of ideas here's what they thought-

Isn't it just incredible to see?

Finally, the day ended with open making at our new maker space endeavour- the Genius Cart! Student are able to come and explore making with various materials and challenges. Today there were students from Grades 3-5 exploring K'Nex, building tinfoil boats, and building constellations on the light table. And there was a hum. A hum of thinking, a hum of questions, a hum of discussion. Was it a little noisy? Yes. Was it a little messy? Yes. Was it purposeful? YES.

Each student there launched themselves into their own mini-inquiry cycle. They developed a question about how they might construct an object/a boat/a constellation and then tried their first design which in most cases didn't work or they didn't like. But they tried again. We discussed solutions. We discussed failing forward. We discussed, and tried, and discussed and tried. 

We were playing the long game of inquiry and the students knew the game. 

And they liked it.