For class this past Tuesday, we were fortunate enough to have Trevor MacKenzie come to our class as a guest speaker. I found this class very interesting and learned a lot about what I want to include in my future classroom. The first thing we learned was about inquiry, and I really liked the ideas about inquiry-based learning. I think student agency, and helping the students learn to take on some of their own learning is important. I like the idea of building up towards free inquiry, and having a gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to increase the students’ agency. It provides the students with more responsibility and allows them to take their learning into their own hands and do what works best for them. When teaching with this, you cannot move too fast and jump right into the deep end (free inquiry); you need to focus on the skills and competencies being built, and start in the shallow end with very structured learning and slowly build up towards free inquiry. I also learned that deep learning could happen during the structured inquiry, not just in the free inquiry stage. I would like to try inquiry-based learning in my future classroom. One key point that I need to remember is that you cannot throw the students into free inquiry when they are used to having structure and being told what to do, because they will not know what to do and may have some trouble with their learning. I will make sure I take time and go through the process properly and at a pace that works for all my students.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash