The Importance Of Inquiry In The Classroom

In order to understand how to implement an inquiry-based classroom the first question to answer is ‘What is inquiry-based learning and how can we apply inquiry learning into our everyday teaching and learning activities? In an inquiry-based classroom, student interest is at the center of curriculum planning, instruction and assessment. Inquiry is a process of learning that is driven by questioning, thoughtful investigating, making sense of information, and developing new understandings. The students are responsible for ask questions, researching their questions, and choosing how to present their findings. Students are in charge of solving problems or answer posing questions rather than having the teacher simply present facts or answer questions …show more content…
The importance of students understanding and correctly using these skills is why emerging inquiry is vital in the elementary school classroom. This is how teachers can use their reading and writing workshop times to help students grow their skills so that inquiry learning can be a successful method of instruction within the classroom. Students must be able to inquire about both fiction and nonfiction and use text based information as their context for their interpretation of a text. The ability of students to do this must be explicitly taught before students can successfully incorporate these skills into their learning independently. For students to have this ability, they need to constantly practice the skill. According to Yildirim, Yildiz & Ates (2011), in the article Is Vocabulary a Strong Variable Predicting Reading Comprehension and Does the Prediction Degree of Vocabulary Vary according to Text Types, they state that “Teachers should encourage students to read more. Contents of texts, which children meet, would …show more content…
As stated by Meyer & Ray (2011) in their article Structure strategy interventions: Increasing reading comprehension of expository text, “comprehension of expository text is critical for academic success in school” (Meyer & Ray, 2011). Comprehension of expository text is critical for academic success in school. Despite this importance, in comparison to narrative texts, students receive less exposure to expository texts in early elementary school (Meyer & Ray, 2011). Reading comprehension involves actively building new understandings by constructing relationships among the parts of text and between the text and one 's pre-existing knowledge. Having the ability to comprehend an expository text is vital to inquiry based learning and is one that must be taught to students first before this style of learning is successfully implement. The lack of exposure to expository texts early on in a child’s academic career may place readers at a disadvantage because students increasingly are expected to learn from expository texts in language arts, science, and social studies (Meyer & Ray,