Teaching with Inquiry

Book excerpt: Inquiry Learning is an innovative, hands-on, and collaborative approach to student learning. The Inquiry Learning Model shifts the heavy cognitive lifting from the teacher to the student. Documents and artifacts are used to provoke deep analysis and hone critical-thinking skills as students work in teams to interpret and connect clues to solve a mystery. A detailed step-by-step methodology is provided as well as six multidisciplinary lessons. Lessons are suitable for collaborative teaching or stand alone in discipline specific classes. For example, Exploitation and Immortality: The Story of Henrietta Lacks, is a lesson that can be used in the science, social studies, English or math classroom, or a combination of any of these disciplines. In addition to the methodology and lessons, Teaching with Inquiry includes differentiation strategies to adapt lessons to all learners, suggestions for lesson use in multiple disciplines, and a variety of graphic organizers to help students organize, process, and summarize the information throughout the lesson.