Reintroducing Inquiry Learning Into The Elementary Classroom

In January of last year I introduced an inquiry block named C.H.O.I.C.E (Children Have Ownership In Choice Education) into my weekly schedule.  I told my students that for an hour and a half every Thursday I was setting aside time for them to follow their passions.  Initially there was much excitement on my part and on the part of my students.  Some students wanted to learn about art while others wanted to learn how to use Windows Movie Maker to produce videos.  The first mistake I made was spending more time figuring out a cute acronym for the block of time I was setting aside rather than preparing my students for new way for doing school. Upon reflection I got my priorities all wrong.  As part of my #learningproject in EDCI 569 with Alec Couros, I intend to ‘right the ship’ and reintroduce inquiry-learning into my classroom in more intentional way.

 

I have some important goals I would like to achieve with this project:

1. Create a framework that is suitable for inquiry learning in an elementary school setting
2. Scaffold the learning process so all my learners can experience a successful project
3. Include parents in the project by sharing learning throughout the process not just at the end
4. Create conditions for students to share their learning at the end of the project with the rest of the class and publicly
5. Provide just the right amount of guidance so as not to exhibit too much control over learning
6. Share the resources I collect through the process of my learning via a tool such Diigo or Scoop.It

 

I plan to share my learning on my blog under the category ‘CHOICE’ and the tag ‘#LearningProject’.  My blog posts will also auto populate to Twitter using the hashtags #LearningProject and #TIEGrad.

In addition, I have discovered that with any learning project it is important to connection with a like-minded community for support and inspiration.  With this in mind I plan to attend two Twitter chat each month.  Sadly, they are both on Thursdays at 6pm PST which means I can only attend for the first half hour because of class but something is better than nothing.  #GeniusHour is held on the first Thursday of every month and #InquiryChat is bi-weekly on Thursdays at 6pm.

Let the journey begin…