Inquiry Based Learning

By Anne Lemay Pedagogical Consultant Central Québec School Board lemaya@cscq.qc.ca

Anne Lemay has over twenty-five years of elementary school teaching experience in both Quebec and Ontario. More recently, she taught a multi-age Cycle One class at Ste-Foy Elementary School, one of the three English schools chosen to pilot the Quebec Education Program. Anne sits on both the Evaluation and English language Arts Consultative Committees. During the summer of 2001, Anne co-taught Reform School at McGill University. Anne is presently a pedagogical consultant with the Central Quebec School Board. Her focus is the Québec Education Programme and students with special needs.

"Inquiry: A Model for Teaching and Learning" (A Power Point presentation)

Working in a pilot school, on a Cycle One team, gave me the opportunity to experiment with inquiry over a two-year period. Our team discovered that working with "big questions" would help us move from themes, which were teacher directed, to inquiry projects, which were directed by student questions guided by the teacher.

Inquiry is the strategy that helped us incorporate the philosophy of the QEP into everyday project work. We had to let go of the idea that if we didn't have the materials we couldn't answer the questions. Our group had questions of our own. Uncharted territory and the quest for answers to problems and questions became our life. What would these projects look like? What was our focus? How and what would we evaluate? Our team was fortunate enough to be given permission to experiment with everything right down to the student timetable and groupings.

Questions were the basis for extending, understanding and clarifying ideas pertinent to our students. We had to remember that we had to focus on their questions which related to the larger issue or idea. We scaffolded knowledge to record what they knew, what they wanted to know, and finally what they learned. In the case of an issue, we guided the students to ask themselves this question: Did we change our mind about our opinion with the new knowledge that we now have? We were aiming for this kind of refection and critical thinking before, during and at the end of the project. Can this kind of inquiry where we are looking at larger issues be effective at the Cycle One level? After living the experience, my answer is yes, through reflection and discussion.
I use the example of the "Bug" inquiry to show that when I was planning with my cycle team, we decided, in this case, that before young children could come up with and tackle issues around bugs that they would have to know more about them. We have looked at issues, or questions first in other projects with success.

I looked at Howard Gardner's five entry points to give ideas on how teachers could initiate topics related to the Broad Areas of Learning. These entry points relate to the various multiple intelligences that exist in every classroom. We know that the more entry points we use, the more students we are addressing. The most effective entry point is when a student initiates the inquiry. In this case it might be a student bringing a bug from the schoolyard into the class in early spring. Differentiation of process and product were also connected to the intelligences and addressed.

The infrastructure in the classroom, provided for whole class and small group settings, students taking responsibility for their learning, lots of critical talk and different interest groups. Cooperative learning is crucial to inquiry because project work usually involves research with material that can be jig sawed and there should be many pair share opportunities for discussion situations, to name only a few of these strategies.

Inquiry makes us ask questions, solve problems and come to ask more questions which is followed by new understandings. Inquiry is a circle of learning as a group, not forgetting to pursue individual questions. The Inquiry Circle (Short, Harste, with Burke 1966) can be effectively used as a curricular framework for inquiry.
The Cycle One team found that even though we were looking at the same topic our inquiry would be quite different. The students questions set the direction, but we guided them to work around the key concept, which helped to keep us all on track. We found that inquiry, because of its democratic nature, helped to make connections for students, both individual and group, that kept them engaged in their learning.

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