Thoughts on teaching & educational technology

Once students have become somewhat proficient with LoQ it’s time to put it to use. I’ve found that it’s best to get students working with the model, and framing questions, right away. This isn’t an adjunct to my lessons — it’s not a model that I use periodically — it’s what I do most of the time. That’s critical to the inquiry process — it has to become a habit of thought & action. If it’s treated like a type of lesson, like a simulation or debate or student presentations or whatever, it’s not going to work.

This doesn’t mean that you need to teach all your lessons from a pure inquiry standpoint, but it does mean that you will need to weave student-driven inquiry and questioning into every lesson. Otherwise, the skills get rusty, and are never developed to a high enough degree to enable consistent work at the top end of Bloom’s.

I’ve found a number of online resources that describe the inquiry process quite well, and instead of reinventing the wheel I’ll just dump one of the links here today, another in a day or so, and then a series of lessons and teaching experiences I’ve had with using different forms & modes of inquiry in my history and government classes over the last few years.

Inquiry-Based Learning

jdg