Inquiry Led Learning and Teaching as Inquiry (Week 13)

Homework:
Add your school's Inquiry learning model to the slide-set (as picture, text or links). Our school uses the SOLO Taxonomy model.

Digital & Collaborative Learning (DCL) - Inquiry Led Learning

There are lots of inquiry models... as we all know

Some tools that might help to manage inquiry projects:

- Unitec Library Website

- Google Scholar

- Reference managers (e.g. Wizfolio)

- Instagrok

A video from the MOE around Inquiry Learning - from knowledge to understanding.

There is significant need for students to understand the processes of critical thinking that improves their ability to reason, evaluate, judge and assess. Critical or reflective thinking is integral to inquiry and to the process of forming an opinion or building knowledge.

The role of a teacher is to carefully plan learning units, support students to explore activities to help them understand the topic and to teach them how to follow an inquiry process. Questioning plays an important part...

Conclusion: Teachers should guide students and coach them to observe, wonder & ponder, investigate, conclude.

In this model, everyone practices research all the time.

Task:

• Decide, as a class, what inquiry model you will adopt for this week’s activity and make it visible
• Apply the chosen inquiry model to the question "Will robots/AI reduce the need for human teachers?"

Our group choose Glenbrooke school's model for the inquiry process around the question about robots/AI. Looking at the variety of inquiry models, each one of them had something we wondered about, even our own (which we are thinking of tweaking a bit). Nevertheless, this is what we came up with following an inquiry process.

Positive: following process of questioning
Negative: some things are just easier to teach and quicker without following an inquiry process 

Task:

• Program a robot

How hard is it to make and program robots? (1h Challenge). Although we did not actually make the robots, we did have to program them... with some great laughter and fun going on all around.

When walking back to the table, I accidentally dropped it [and it broke it into pieces!] and I was looking for the button to turn it off...

        

              

Leadership in Digital & Collaborative Learning (LDC) - Teaching as Inquiry

We briefly looked into [the well known] teaching as inquiry as this is also an important component of our next assignment.

Inquiry is underpinned by the process of 'double-loop' learning. This requires us to question underlying assumptions and beliefs as part of our decision-making process. Single loop learning has often been compared to a thermostat in that it makes a 'decision' to either turn off or on. Double loop learning is like a thermostat that asks 'why' - is this a good time to switch things.

Tasks: 

• Plan the focussing inquiry phase of a teaching as inquiry project

• Analyse assumptions and thinking underlying some sample teaching as inquiry questions

~ "Cognitive development is the science of educational psychology." - C. J. Brainerd, "Jean Piaget, Learning Research, and American Education" ~