Inquiring About Inquiry Based Instruction

This weeks reading focused on Inquiry Based Learning or IBI. IBI is  “the creation of a classroom where students are engaged in essentially open-ended, student centered, hands-on activities.” A key point in IBI is that the students have to pose the questions unlike problems based learning where the teacher may present the problem for the student to find the answer. Inquiry Based learning poses a lot of unknowns for the students to discover, research, and analyze.

Through the readings I also discovered that IBI has 4 different levels and there are different strategies for implementation. This was very interesting to find out, I often hear the term IBI thrown about but have not heard about the strategies for implementation.

As I read through the material I still find this to be a very difficult teaching method for a pre service and beginning teacher to think about implementing. IBI is most effective when the teacher has a solid foundation in the material being taught. New and beginning teachers have not yet mastered that foundation, so how do we speed up this process, since this is what the education model in turning to?

I think that IBI seems like a challenge partially because I have never observed a real classroom implementing IBI methods either. I have attended several workshops where they presented and demonstrated how this would go in a classroom but its not the same thing as actually seeing it done. I suppose that is why we will be traveling to Greenwood High School this week to see some Inquiry Based Learning in action!

I see how IBI would be the most effective teaching method but I also imagine that it can be over done. When you talk about an entire unit being IBI, I think it may be challenging to keep the motivation of this method high with students after multiple uses. However, maybe this inquiry will continue to be a self motivator longer than I suspect.

I am excited to begin learning about this topic for the next few weeks while we discover the challenges and ways in which to implant this into our classrooms one day.