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All material is my personal opinion, and not that of any other organization. Copyright 2001. Permission is granted for individual teacher use. All rights reserved. |
For my practice, I feel I have discovered a valuable framework for guiding my students to successful inquiry. My students are still at the early phases of their development as investigators. They are, as yet, not capable of the autonomous inquiry I set as my goal early on. To be really competent investigators, able to define their own investigatable questions, design effective, controlled experiments, carry them out and reach scientific conclusions, will probably require several years of sequenced experience, along the lines I have begun. The structure I provided for their inquiry is like training wheels, and should be discarded when they have learned to ride for themselves. This research suggests the need to have an extended view toward building inquiry skills, and to have teachers of successive grade levels agree on these goals and strategies if higher levels of competence and autonomy are to be achieved. My teaching practice became unusually public in the past year. Colleagues visited, I asked for extensive student feedback, and posted my journal and comments from colleagues on my web site. This process greatly expanded my circle of critical collaborators, which had previously been limited to my collaborative teacher research group. I feel this accelerated my ability to learn from my experiences, and allowed me to effectively move ahead through difficult episodes. This also has the effect of sharing my insights along the way, creating a collective sense of ownership of the discoveries we make. My colleagues are not engaged in identical work, yet they can actively learn from my experience, just as I learn when they share their experiences, and their critique of my work. This collaborative community will be an ongoing feature of my work. While guided inquiry provides a useful structure for framing student investigations, it does not answer all questions regarding science instruction. My students arrive with a diverse range of skills, interests and needs, and my instruction must be reinvented with each class. Basing investigations on their own questions helps create ownership, but what of the students who have no questions about the topic I have chosen? What of those students who are alienated from the learning process and fail to engage in spite of these opportunities? My inquiry will continue to focus on the challenge of reaching all my students, and equipping them to think and act for themselves, individually and collectively. Next section: References |
Oakland Unified
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