Slides from Learning Science Through Inquiry.pdf
Invitation to Inquiry – Grid Summary.pdf
Process Skill rubric.pdf
Pennies on a Bridge Inquiry Card – used for the DRiVe activity
If you want more then check out what’s on offer this August up at SFU
Summer Workshop: Smarter Science (August 21 & 22)
Weblinks
- Inquiry Cards
- Posters (8 ½ x 11)
- Teacher source website ($US, bulk order b/c shipping cost)
- Learning Science Through Inquiry: Using Questions to Lead Learning
- PEOE approach: We didn’t show this in the workshop but it is third approach that may be of interest.
Books
- Inquire Within (VSB Book Club 2012/2013)
- Teaching Highschool Science through Inquiry and Argumentation
- Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions
- Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry: Promoting Deep Understandings in Language Arts and the Content Areas With Guiding Questions
Renovating My Classroom 
I want to try the bridge experiment in my summer school class ! Do you have other cool experiments for little people?
Pamela Hansen LD / Literacy Consultant Vancouver School Board
Hugely important stuff here, thanks for sharing.
I think a lot of kids go through school without doing much “science” at all. My guess is that kids do more in elementary school than HS. Much of HS science seems to be learning from a textbook – I’m as guilty as anyone on this. Many teachers/classrooms do a really good job though. There is a real craft in getting kids to ask good questions, but I think the payoff is big. More student engagement, more learning of skills, more things that the students take with them into their future.
Doug:
Love your engagement and thinking. Agree that sometimes science can be more about rushing through a lot of content rather than learning to “think like a scientist”. I have often heard the phrase “doing science” used to describe a more hands-on approach to teaching science and your comment about “getting kids to ask good questions” is a key one.
In “Inquire Within” Douglas Llewellyn makes the statement that: “although true inquiry involves hands-on and minds-on learning, not all hands-on activities are inquiry-based. When a hands-on activity provides the question to be solved, what materials to be used, how to go about finding the answer, and how to organize the data collected, it’s probably not inquiry.”
Where techniques like the QFT are helpful are that it gives teachers a framework to support students in generating meaningful questions that students are interested in find the answers to. (and depending on whether the questions are written as open-ended or closed-ended one may end up with even more questions). The value of this includes: increased student engagement, the opportunity for the teacher to learn alongside the students (thinking of elementary teachers in particular), and the information that the teacher gains about what students already know & what they want to learn more about.
Jacob