Inquiry Reflection

I have a mentor and former professor named Kimberly Mitchell that always reminds her students that in the classroom, whoever is doing the talking is doing the thinking. She runs a start-up that focuses on integrating inquiry into the classroom by looking at the statistics of that same notion; by recording and analyzing the time the teacher and the students spend talking in a classroom, she argues educators can get a better glimpse into how their students are receiving the lessons they plan. My understanding of inquiry is deeply rooted in this mantra. As I understand it, the goal at the heart of inquiry is to teach both content and process within the same lesson in a way that requires students to actively engage with the material and with each …show more content…
First and foremost, I think it is critical to the process to make students aware of the processes they learn simultaneously with content through inquiry. Had we not taken the time to reflect on the skills we were using to determine the fate of the defendant in the court case, I likely would not have given it a second thought independently and would have disregarded the important skills we were using and refining. That debriefing period at the end of the lesson is crucial, in my mind, to inquiry in that students must be made aware of the things they have learned that are not as obvious throughout the lesson. Additionally, my main question regarding inquiry is this: should inquiry be the teaching style for every single lesson, on every single day? Is that sustainable for a teacher to develop a curriculum based entirely in inquiry, or would that ultimately be detrimental given the current standards that students must meet as required by law? Is inquiry a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday type of thing to bring into the classroom, as much as vocabulary review or map quizzes would be? Will there ever be a point that teachers will be able to make inquiry a part of their every day routine, or do the qualifications that students need to meet by the end of the year have to be altered …show more content…
The first is the piece I mentioned above regarding the sustainability of inquiry, and how teachers may not be able to cover the amount of content through using entirely inquiry-based lesson plans that the state requires over the course of a school year. Additionally, students would reap the same negative results as well by potentially receiving lower test scores for not knowing the answers to all the Jeopardy questions on state exams. Additionally, it should be noted that developing and executing well-formed inquiry-based lesson plans isn’t a cakewalk for educators. They require not only the effort to devise creative and quality activities that engage students to get them to the point where they start to care about what they are doing, but they also require students who are willing to actively participate in the first place in order to get much out of the experience. It is easy to simply become a talking head and tell students what they should know or need to know, but finding ways to get them excited about what they are learning and to learn it through practicing the skills they may need to be successful in the future is much