I currently teach 2nd and 5th grade science at The School at Columbia University, a K-8 independent school in New York City. In the classroom I encourage a lot of investigation and I fill the room with tools for doing science and materials for the children to explore. During this past fifth grade unit on plants we had hundreds of plants growing including tomato plants`, bean stalks, Wisconsin Fast Plants, Venus fly traps etc. I often tell my kids, “We don’t just read about science, we do science.” I am also enthusiastic about technology and believe there is a lot of potential in the use of technology in the science classroom.
I called this blog The Inquiry Files because I think that there needs to be more of a focus on inquiry and what inquiry means in the classroom. A common misconception about inquiry is the unstructured classroom: children playing around and the teacher not setting an organized environment for productive activity. In fact inquiry, when done well, is a carefully crafted classroom environment. The materials chosen, the questions posed, the way the task is structured, the use of assessment and the building of scientific ideas over time can be tailored to promote successful inquiry into a topic. It is the choices that we make as teachers that determine the success of inquiry. Of course there need to be mistakes along the way. I often tell my students that just as they are learning to experiment with scientific materials I am experimenting as a teacher. Some of the things we try might not work but that can become its own learning experience. I see it as another chance to model risk taking.
Inquiry is a buzz word in science these days but I think a lot more work needs to be done defining it through examples. Through the entries of this blog I hope to do just, sharing some of the things that have worked for me and also pointing out pitfalls that I hit so that you can avoid them. Each entry will only be one small piece of my inquiry approach, but over time I hope to paint a fuller picture of inquiry in action.
