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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1
Questioning for Learning

Wendy L. Ostroff

In a way, all knowledge results from questioning. Asking begins with not knowing but wanting to know, a state Piaget (1973) called disequilibrium. His research showed that it was the child's discomfort of not knowing that set curiosity and inquiry in motion. If learning consists of exploring and making sense of things, then questioning is the call to action that ignites learning. Yet, although educators extol the virtues of creativity and insight in learners, questioning-the engine of transformative and critical thinking-is rarely taught or even rewarded in the classroom.

In school, questions tend to come from the teacher. These questions are often designed to get students thinking. Teachers' questions, at their best, invite students to challenge their own assumptions, to engage, and to join larger dialogues. Such questioning can model creative and critical ways of examining the content at hand. But even at their most inspiring, teachers' questions guide students' thinking along some predetermined path. They are designed to elicit correct answers, or at least answers within a certain framework of thinking.

Genuine questioning, in contrast, is a pattern of behavior-a way of being-that forges new paths and challenges assumptions. A student who has developed into a questioner will wonder, "Why are we doing this particular thing in this particular way?" (Berger, 2014). Such students can approach any content and find a new way to consider or investigate it.

If educators are interested in fostering deep student learning (including the habits of mind of creativity, innovation, and critique), we need to go beyond posing our interesting questions. Our end goal must be to teach students how to articulate their own questions-and while they're at it, to question everything around them.

Here are six reasons most powerful learning occurs when students ask the questions.

1. Student questioning ignites intrinsic motivation.

Asking questions that they are genuinely interested in knowing the answers to activates in students an internal desire for action, what psychologists call intrinsic motivation. A century of research on learning shows that, whether we're talking about rats or 4th graders, without motivation there is no learning. Not surprisingly, intrinsically motivated students learn better than those who are pushed by external rewards or punishments (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 2001).

Lucky for us, children come into the world endlessly motivated. But when the impetus for learning starts to come from outside, as often happens in school, they begin to focus on giving the teacher what he or she wants (what my colleagues and I refer to as "playing the game of school"). Students become less involved in the learning process or activity itself, and more involved in the outcomes-getting the correct answers to questions posed by those in power.

In a classic study, researchers at Stanford promised some children a "good player award" for working on an art project; other children were simply invited to work on the same art project with no reward. The children who got the award were less interested in working with the art materials during later free-play sessions, compared with those who had simply been allowed to enjoy the activity without being rewarded (Lepper & Greene, 1975). A more recent meta-analysis of 128 separate experiments showed that external rewards for learning (like gold stars) undermined intrinsic motivation, competence, and self-determination, especially in children (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 2001).

When it comes to questioning that fuels learning, sincere wonder is also best. Cifone (2013) catalogued 8-year-old students' questioning behaviors as they completed a problem-solving task. The questions that the children came up with on their own were much more likely to lead to further inquiry than the questions the researchers or others asked them. Cifone noted,

The critical factor was that what the children said and did came from themselves, as a personal question .... Even if someone else originally asked a question, it only became a genuine question for the students when they asked it themselves. (p. 52)

2. Questioning in school maintains children's natural tendency to question.

From the time they can talk, children hit the conversational ground asking. A preschooler's questions can range anywhere from "What's for lunch?" to "Why am I a person?" Asking questions is what children's brains were born to do. When a child encounters something that he or she doesn't know or understand, the child uses questions to quickly gather information, learn about the world, and solve immediate problems (Chouinard, Harris, & Maratsos, 2007).

Children's questions have been studied as clues to the workings of the developing mind. In one study, preschool-age children were wired with recording devices that recorded everything they said during a typical day. The children asked an average of 76 information-seeking questions per hour, in search of both facts and explanations, with one child asking her poor mother 145 questions in a single hour (Chouinard et al., 2007). "Question-asking," these researchers concluded, "is a central part of what it means to be a child" (p. 25).

But recent research suggests that entering school can halt student questioning. Susan Engel (2011), who also has an article in this issue, wanted to understand what happens to preschoolers, typically so inquisitive, as they entered kindergarten. She and her team went into elementary schools and noted any time a child asked a question in order to learn more, tinkered with a classroom object, or used other gestures to show curiosity. In kindergarten classrooms, episodes of curiosity averaged about two to five during any two-hour stretch. By 5th grade, self-generated questioning was strikingly absent, with zero to two episodes per visit being average. In other words, most children were spending seven or more hours of their day in school without asking even one question. If we designed our curriculums to let the students ask more of the questions, we might avoid squashing their inherent wonder.

3. Questioning activates the prefrontal cortex.

Neuroscientists have begun to discover that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for the combined questioning and critical thinking that underlie inquiry. When students take initiative, make plans and set goals, and integrate and synthesize information, they are using their prefrontal cortex (Fleming, 2010). One study showed that the ability to think in intellectually creative ways (including the ability to pose unique, thoughtful questions) depended on the function of the prefrontal cortex. Patients with lesions in that region had profound impairment in their ability to express original thoughts and ideas (Shamay-Tsoory, Adler, Aharon-Peretz, Perry, & Mayseless, 2011). Neural activity in the prefrontal cortex also decreases when motivation stems more from extrinsic rewards (Murayama, Matsumoto, Izuma, & Matsumoto, 2010).

Studies show that people with damage to the prefrontal cortex ask significantly fewer questions and use questions less often to show interest in the topics at hand (Gupta, 2012). It would seem to follow that when a student poses his or her own questions, the prefrontal cortex is activated, enhancing both higher order thinking and the integration of ideas.

4. The classroom dynamic changes.

Whoever asks the questions holds the power. Teacher-initiated questions implicitly let students know the boundaries of what can be examined, setting up a top-down power dynamic. French philosopher Michel Foucault (1982) was acutely aware of this problem in formal education; he noted that when those in power set up the discourse, they limit the bounds of knowledge. Indeed, when Palmer Wolf (1987) recorded episodes of questioning in schools, she discovered that teachers tended to monopolize the right to question, ceding power only to select few students.

When students ask more questions, they become active learners who demonstrate an ownership of classroom inquiry.

5. Questioning helps students manipulate ideas.

Remembering information isn't the same as constructing knowledge. Facts and tidbits that are useful on tests are rarely useful outside the classroom. The number of words a student has memorized in a foreign language often corresponds little to that student's ability to understand or speak the language fluently. And many students who do well in a course proceed to forget what they've "learned."

Schneps (1989) asked students graduating from Harvard University, "Why does the earth have seasons?" and discovered that nearly everyone answered incorrectly. Most of these college graduates had probably learned in elementary school that the tilt of the earth's axis causes seasons. But they had done no cognitive manipulation-no thinking about this information or acting upon it-to make it stick.

Questioning, however, is by nature active. When we're forced to articulate questions about a topic, we have to do something with the information at hand: apply it and think about it. This helps us truly learn and remember.

6. Students' insights are formed and revealed.

Students' questions aren't just portholes into the thoughts they already have; they are the seeds of thought itself. For a middle school student to ask about a passage she has read, for example, she must synthesize the content; find the line between what is clear and what is unclear to her (which demands metacognition); tap into her intrinsic curiosity; and simultaneously form and articulate thoughts. Her questions about the passage both enable and reflect her emerging understanding.

There is a tradition in composition education in which students "write to learn," or discover as they go. There should also be a tradition of "asking to learn" in which students articulate and develop their thinking as they ask questions. Indeed, when students are instructed to brainstorm using only questions, as opposed to fully formed thoughts, imagination opens up like a floodgate. Ideas become creative, subversive, and playful (Berger, 2014).

I would have little idea where my students are intellectually if I merely asked them my questions about topics we're examining. Their own questions reveal to me not just what they understood from the particular text or experience, but also many facets of their developing learning process: things they want to find out about, their partially developed ideas, their attempts to find out what works, and-ultimately-their personal discourse with themselves. They expose their biases-and mine-and help me see what's being taken for granted and what might be possible.

A quick check into the questions my 4- and 6-year old children ask ("Do viruses sleep in the nighttime?" "Can Grandma be in two places at once?") makes it clear how divergent their worldviews are from my own. It's almost impossible for us as teachers to remember our frame of mind when we experienced our first insights as students. And those with more experience or expertise in any topic have a difficult time putting themselves in novices' shoes (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). That's why we must listen to what our students are thinking and wondering.

Questioning also supports metacognition. Students' questions make their learning and thinking explicit to themselves-and understanding and owning the process of learning through metacognition propels the learning itself (Ostroff, 2012).

Questioning belongs at the heart of pedagogical and curriculum design. Although it requires patience and faith to let the students set the stage, we can teach students to question effectively-and nothing reveals their thinking or transforms their thought processes more. If we want to promote inquiry and scaffold problem solving in the classroom, let's transfer as much questioning as possible to students.

References

Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. New York: Bloomsbury.

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Chouinard, M. M., Harris, P. L., & Maratsos, M. P. (2007). Children's questions: A mechanism for cognitive development. Boston: Blackwell.

Cifone, M.V. (2013). Questioning and learning: How do we recognize children's questions? Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 15(1&2), 41-55.

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation in education: Reconsidered once again. Review of Educational Research, 71(1), 1-27.

Dyer, J., Gregerson, H., & Christiansen, C. M. (2011). The innovator's DNA: Mastering the five skills of disruptive innovators. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

Engel, S. (2011). Children's need to know: Curiosity in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 625-645.

Fleming S. (2010). Relating introspective accuracy to individual differences in brain structure. Science, 329(5998), 1541-1543.

Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Afterword to H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Brighton, UK: Harvester.

Gupta, R. (2012). The effects of ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage on interpersonal coordination in social interaction. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa). Retrieved from http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2883

Lepper, M. R., & Greene, D. (1975). Turning play into work: Effects of adult surveillance and extrinsic rewards on children's intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31(3), 479-486.

Murayama, K., Matsumoto, M., Izuma, K., & Matsumoto, K. (2010). Neural basis of the undermining effect of monetary reward on intrinsic motivation. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(49), 20,911-20,916. doi:10.1073/pnas.1013305107

Ostroff, W. L. (2012). Understanding how young children learn: Bringing the science of child development to the classroom. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Palmer Wolf, D. (1987). The art of questioning. Academic Connections, Winter, 1-7.

Piaget, J. (1973). Main trends in psychology. London: Allen and Unwin.

Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., Adler, N., Aharon-Peretz, J., Perry, D., & Mayseless, N. (2011). The origins of originality: The neural bases of creative thinking and originality. Neuropsychologia, 49(2), 178-185. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.11.020

Schneps, M. H. (1989). A private universe: Misconceptions that block learning [Video]. Santa Monica, CA: Pyramid Film and Video.

Endnote

The researchers interviewed people who invented revolutionary products, founded companies built on innovative business approaches, or ignited innovation in existing companies.

Wendy L. Ostroff is a faculty member in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University in California, and author of Understanding How Young Children Learn (ASCD, 2012).

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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1 Questioning for Learning Wendy L. Ostroff In a way, all knowledge results from questioning. Asking begins with not knowing but wanting to know, a state Piaget (1973) called disequilibrium. His research showed that it was the child's discomfort of not knowing that set curiosity and inquiry in motion.

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February 2013 | Volume 70 | Number 5
Creativity Now! Pages 36-40

Susan Engel

Einstein was wrong. I'm not referring to anything he said or wrote about physics but to his famous comment, "Curiosity is a delicate little plant which, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom." Curiosity needs more than stimulation and freedom. For children to develop and satisfy their urge to know, they need role models, opportunities to practice, and guidance.

Walk up to almost any teacher in the United States, ask her whether it's good for children to be curious, and what do you think she'll say? If you think that teacher will say yes, you're right. When my student Hilary Hackmann and I asked teachers to circle on a list the qualities they thought were most important for students to acquire in school, many circled curiosity. When asked on the fly, adults in our society say they value curiosity. Intuitively, people feel it's essential to learning.

But what we admire and what we deliberately cultivate aren't the same. When researchers dig deeper, they find that many adults think of curiosity as a trait possessed by some but not others. Or they think that as long as the environment isn't too repressive, children's natural sense of inquiry will surface (Engel, 2011). In fact, when Hilary and I asked teachers to list which qualities were most important without giving them a list to choose from, almost none mentioned curiosity. Many teachers endorse curiosity when they're asked about it, but it isn't uppermost on their minds-or shaping their teaching plans.

Why is this disturbing? Because research shows unequivocally that when people are curious about something, they learn more, and better. Daniel Berlyne (1954) first demonstrated this in the 1950s. He read people lists of facts, including some that were surprising to them, and led them to ask questions. Later, when asked to recall those lists, subjects remembered the items that had piqued their curiosity better than the others.

It's not just adults who benefit from having their curiosity piqued. When children want to know something, they're more likely to learn it and remember it. Babies play longer with toys in which they've shown a prior interest and explore these toys more; their interest allows them to learn more than they otherwise would. When older students are intrigued by unexpected or mysterious descriptions in their reading, they're more likely to remember that content later, and to more deeply understand what they read (Garner, Brown, Sanders, & Menke, 1992).

Given that curiosity has such a positive impact on learning, you might assume that teachers are doing everything they can to encourage it. But that's not the case.

Where Have All the Questions Gone?

When my students and I observed suburban elementary classrooms in 2006, looking for signs of students' curiosity, we found a surprising absence of it. To gauge curiosity, we looked for

The number and types of questions students asked (anything from "Where is the Sudan?" to "When is recess?").

Stretches of time that students spent gazing at something (for instance, standing in front of an aquarium observing fish).

Times when a student physically investigated something (such as opening up the back of a cassette machine).

For the most part, kindergartners asked very few questions and spent little time investigating the environment. In any given two-hour stretch, we'd see anywhere from two to five questions or explorations. What students were doing instead was often engaging to them, or educationally productive-learning about the sounds of letters, discussing the day's weather, detecting visual patterns on worksheets, and the like. But students weren't coming up with questions about what they wanted to know, spending time learning how to answer those questions, or exploring the physical world.

In the liveliest classrooms, kids did lots of hands-on activities-acting out scenarios, building with blocks, following instructions to do an experiment, and so on. But in virtually all these activities, students followed adult instructions, and, in most of the more experiential activities, the teacher had a very clear idea of what students should get out of the activity.

When our transcripts noted questions, they were most often asked by the teacher: "What do you think this is?" or "What makes bears different from birds?" In some cases, when a student piped up with a question that might lead the discussion in another direction, the teacher kindly but firmly put that question aside to get back to the lesson's focus.

In 5th grade classrooms, the situation was even more striking. A typical two-hour stretch of time often didn't yield even one student question. That means 11-year-olds often go for hours at a time in school without indicating anything they want to know about.

The irony is that children are born with an overpowering need to know. They want to know what every object feels and looks like and what will happen when they attempt to do different things with that object. They want to know why people behave the way they do. This voracious appetite for knowledge defines us as a species. And it doesn't evaporate when babies become toddlers. Every preschool teacher knows that children between the ages of 18 months and 5 years are insatiable for information. Their curiosity drives much of their learning-through asking questions, watching what others do, listening to what adults say, and tinkering with the world around them. But somehow the incessant curiosity that leads to so much knowledge during the first five years of life dwindles as children go to school.

Encouragement: A Key Ingredient

What might explain the gap between the intense curiosity of young children and the apparent lack of curiosity among older children? I think many adults implicitly believe that children naturally get less curious over time. This belief isn't totally unreasonable. Data do suggest that curiosity becomes less robust over time (Coie, 1974). And if curiosity is, as psychologists say, the urge to explain the unexpected, then as more of everyday life becomes familiar, a child might encounter fewer unexpected objects and events. Perhaps the reduced curiosity of the 7-year-old is simply a by-product of that child's increased knowledge.

However, adult influence may also be a factor. When researchers invite children into a room containing a novel object, they find that children are very attuned to the feedback of adults. When the experimenter makes encouraging faces or comments, children are more likely to explore the interesting object. Experiments I've done show that children show much more interest in materials when an adult visibly shows how curious he or she is about the materials. In other words, children's curiosity can be fostered or squelched by the people they spend time with.

Although it's hard to discourage the investigations of a 2-year-old, it's all too easy to discourage those of 7-, 11-, or 15-year-olds. In one classroom I observed, a 9th grader raised her hand to ask if there were any places in the world where no one made art. The teacher stopped her midsentence with, "Zoe, no questions now, please; it's time for learning."

Often the ways in which teachers unwittingly discourage curiosity are much subtler. By the same token, teachers can also encourage curiosity in subtle ways. One teacher I've observed often begins sentences to her students with the phrase, "Let's see what happens." She's showing them the value of finding things out.

What Can Educators Do?

If you consider both the idea that curiosity is a powerful elixir for learning and the idea that as children age their curiosity requires more nurturing, it's clear teachers should pay serious attention to helping students acquire or retain a thirst to find out about the world.

Easy to say; harder to do. Teachers are faced with umpteen goals and many obstacles that get in the way of meeting them. We want students to read, learn algebra, master scientific concepts, understand fundamentals of their nation's history, work things out with peers, become motivated to do well on unappealing tasks, and much more. Society expects teachers to do all that with students who have widely varying levels of skill and motivation. It's understandable that taking time to foster something as amorphous as students' eagerness to explore the unexpected would fall off the to-do list.

Further, teachers are less likely to encourage questions, tinkering, or deviations from the script when they feel pressure to accomplish goals that might not leave time for questions, tinkering, or deviations from the script. In my lab, I found that when teachers were subtly instructed to help children learn about science, they were more likely to encourage children's questions and unexpected manipulations of materials. When teachers were instead subtly encouraged to help students finish a worksheet, they were more likely to discourage children's investigations.

Given curiosity's central role, it's essential to figure out what educators can do to help students become more-rather than less-curious over time. An equally important question is, How can we help children gain expertise in satisfying their curiosity? Here are four suggestions.

1. Hire Curious Teachers

Schools should hire teachers who've demonstrated that they're curious. It is hard to fan the flames of a drive you yourself rarely experience. Many principals hire teachers who seem smart, who like children, and who have the kind of drive that supports academic achievement. They know that teachers who possess these qualities will foster the same in their students. But why not put curiosity at the top of the list of criteria for good teachers?

How do we judge whether someone is truly curious? A teacher's thirst for finding out should be evident in what he or she has done or in how he or she behaves. Sometimes a teacher with plenty of curiosity has done scientific research or spent years studying some topic of personal interest (such as butterflies or architecture). Sometimes their curiosity is expressed as an urge to know more about their students. Often teachers of young children excel because of their unending interest in early development. Either way, the teacher who knows what the itch to find out feels like is in a better position to foster that itch in students.

2. Count Classroom Questions

Teachers should record lessons or conversations in their classrooms and then count and categorize the questions their students ask. In his groundbreaking book Better, physician Atul Gawande (2007) encourages people in the medical profession to "count something." He means that causal intuitions about what's happening in one's workplace can be misleading. Even the most thoughtful reflection at the end of the day does not provide the same information as actual recordings.

This observation is as true of schools as it is of hospitals. Few teachers readily see that they're discouraging students' questions, just as few parents readily see that they're short-tempered with their children. Precise and methodical data collection enables us to learn things that are counterintuitive. Teachers who watch video recordings of themselves and count the number of questions students ask will see how much inquiry is being expressed in their classroom-and they'll learn how they respond to students' inquiries.

Moreover, simply by counting questions, teachers will begin to be more aware of them, which will thereby encourage more questioning. Other riches lie in store for them. Teachers can also discover what kinds of things individual students are curious about, who asks lots of questions, and who never asks one. By attending to the quality of their students' questions, they can get ideas about how to help their students develop better questions. What better cues are there for thinking up new activities or topics to discuss?

3. Make Questioning a Goal

Think of question asking as the goal of an educational activity, rather than a happy by-product. Develop activities that invite or require students to figure out what they want to know and then seek answers.

One easy starting place is urging students to use the Internet to ask any question that occurs to them-or arises in class discussion or work. Google can be a curious person's best friend. For instance, today I used Google to answer the following unexpected questions: Which of Henry VIII's wives came after Anne Boleyn, what kind of milk is Mozzarella made of, and what does the city Hyderabad look like? The ease with which we can look things up online is exhilarating-and it makes the urge to know feel good more often.

Of course, a class that invited students to ask questions without helping them seek accurate answers or acquire a robust body of knowledge would leave the educational task half done. The child who's genuinely curious doesn't rest until he or she has satisfied the urge to know. So to cultivate students' curiosity, we must give them both time to seek answers and guidance about various routes to getting answers, such as looking things up in reliable sources or testing hypotheses.

Teachers should encourage students to think about whether their original question has been answered to their satisfaction. These techniques are the bread and butter of the autodidact. Students who learn to teach themselves something new are better prepared for lifelong learning than those who simply learn well from others.

4. Measure Curiosity

It doesn't mean much to value a quality like curiosity in children if you never assess whether it's present. What we measure is what we'll teach. In classrooms where teachers are deliberately cultivating curiosity, they should see more of it in May than in September-and they should see their own responses becoming more encouraging.

Video recording is a great tool for this work. Teachers should regularly videotape activities in their classrooms and score one another's students (to increase objectivity and accuracy) on things like individual students' level of interest, the number of exploratory gestures students use when encountering materials or objects, and the duration of each student's engagement with one activity.

Teachers who keep journals of their daily work with students might go through them at the end of the year to see how many occasions they created for students to figure out what they wanted to know-and pursue answers.

Actually, Einstein was partly right. Curiosity is delicate, and it does need freedom and stimulation. But that's not enough. It needs to be fostered and guided by teachers who feel curious themselves, and who value curiosity. Curiosity isn't the icing on the cake; it's the cake itself.

References

Berlyne, D. (1954). A theory of human curiosity. British Journal of Psychology, 45, 180-191.

Coie, J. (1974). An evaluation of the cross-situational stability of children's curiosity. Journal of Personality, 42, 93-116.

Engel, S. (2011). Children's need to know: Curiosity in school. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 625-645.

Garner, R., Brown, R., Sanders, S., & Menke, D. J. (1992). "Seductive details" and learning from text. In K. A. Renninger, S. Hidi, & A. Krapp (Eds.), The role of interest in learning and development (pp. 239-254). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Gawande, A. (2007). Better: A surgeon's notes on performance. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Susan Engel is senior lecturer in psychology and director of the program in teaching at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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February 2013 | Volume 70 | Number 5 Creativity Now! Pages 36-40 Susan Engel Einstein was wrong. I'm not referring to anything he said or wrote about physics but to his famous comment, "Curiosity is a delicate little plant which, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom."

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dr. eric jackman institute of child study

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dr. eric jackman institute of child study laboratory school

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Environmental Inquiry, Sustainability, Natural Curiosity | Toronto, Ontario

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Environmental Inquiry is an overarching approach to Environmental Education that combines Inquiry-based Learning, Experiential Learning, Integrated Learnig and Stewardship in a dynamic and cohesive four branch pedagogical framework.

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I have found myself thinking a lot about that phrase over the last couple of years - and even more so over the past weeks as a somewhat imposing wave of 'The Science of Learning' continues to roll into the educational discourse here in Australia.

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The power of ummmm... | Kath Murdoch | TEDxWestVancouverED

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a more beautiful question: the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas

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business & economics / decision-making & problem solving

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business & economics / decision-making & problem solving

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A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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To get the best answer-in business, in life-you have to ask the best possible question. Innovation expert Warren Berger shows that ability is both an art and a science.It may be the most underappreciated tool at our disposal, one we learn to use well in infancy-and then abandon as we grow older.

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Bringing Inquiry-Based Learning Into Your Class

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A four-step approach to using a powerful model that increases student agency in learning.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Implementation of The Good Project Lesson Plans

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"At the end of it they may have consumed less content, but remember more of the sum total," Laufenberg said. "And they end up in a better place."
2. Don't tell students what they should know; create the structure for them to experience it on their own.
"Inquiry at its best happens when the teacher is doing very little other than creating the architecture for the experience to happen," Laufenberg said. "It's asking the first question, putting up the provocative primary document or playing the two minute video." After that, the room should be full of kid questions. And if a student gets truly stumped and asks for help from the teacher, her job is to ask another question that pushes the students' thinking forward or raises new questions for the student to investigate.

Laufenberg has worked with well-intentioned, hard working teachers all over the country to infuse more inquiry into their teaching. Many of them find this model destabilizing because for a long time they believed their job was to teach content. To make inquiry-based learning work, teachers have to instead become experts at listening to how a student is thinking and then ask the one question that will "un-stick" the students' thinking and set them off and running again.

"You know it's happening when there's very little telling of things, but rather leading of questions and experiences so the students discover those on their own," Laufenberg said.

[ted id=1034]
3. Use class time to make connections between pieces of information.
Especially with AP classes, students are motivated or else they wouldn't be there. So give them a list of questions, tell them what to study and let them do so outside of class. They can use the textbook, the Internet and many other sources to find that information more efficiently and effectively than a lecture.

"Inside of class, use that time to make connections between information," Laufenberg said. After all, what good are facts if they aren't connected to anything else? "Give them [students] compelling things to do that have them analyze and talk to each other, and grapple with the difficulty of what's going on in whatever it is you happen to be teaching. But stop using your minutes in class to just tell them things." Teachers have the tremendously important role of helping students make sense of the facts they've learned and see connections to other issues.
4. Many kids struggle with reading, so hook them with the non-written word.
When Laufenberg taught at Science Leadership Academy she had a student in her class who was an advanced analytical processor, a great critical thinker and a wonderful problem solver, but she struggled to read and write because of learning differences. Laufenberg wanted her to be able to engage with the class content at the high level of which she was capable, and not be limited by her second grade reading level. She developed the habit of introducing lessons with something visual so the student wouldn't be left out.

"I needed to do this because there was an acute situation I wanted to handle, but what it was doing was inviting all the kids to the table with a level playing field of comprehension, not putting the barrier in front of them to start with, which is the written word for comprehension," Laufenberg said. She would show students something interesting or puzzling, even using 90 second videos to grab their attention. This strategy got students wondering and gave them a little background so that even if they were doing the reading Laufenberg assigned, they came to it with their own questions.

"Your reluctant readers are more likely to make an attempt," Laufenberg said, because they are curious to find the answer to their questions. Laufenberg would often try to give students the baseline information they need to know in the quickest way possible. "We would background build, but it wouldn't be, 'I'm going to tell you a few things today,'" Laufenberg said.

If a complex idea can be imparted through a short video or other means, Laufenberg uses it so the majority of class time can be spent diving into deeper questions and analysis. Laufenberg always got at the background information through questions; she never just told students information.

"It isn't less reading; it's less reading of the least interesting information to yield the more in-depth reading and invested reading," Laufenberg said. She still requires students to read, but if they aren't reading for the background information then they can be engaging more complex and interesting texts.
5. Stop giving struggling kids the most boring version of the work to repeat over and over again.
"We do a really interesting thing in American education; when kids are struggling with something, we just give them the most boring version of it and more of it, over and over and over again," Laufenberg said. There's no way that tactic is going to get students excited about the subject they struggle to understand.

Math teachers commonly say they have to get through some basics in order to get to the interesting content. But if students aren't interested in knowing, they'll never get to the good stuff. "Getting kids to understand that math is not just computation, that math is this whole other thought process and way of thinking about the world, and really trying to understand the bigger picture of math," is the key Laufenberg said. Kids have to care. "Give them a puzzle to figure out to then lead them towards the math that they need to know," Laufenberg said. They need to figure it out on their own, or at least grapple with it to care.

She doesn't think it's that different from history. If the goal of teaching history is for kids to chronologically place events on a timeline, we've missed the full potential for the learning experience. If the purpose of math is only to compute, we've missed something.

And with reading, don't give reluctant readers boring passages to read. Let them read whatever they want. No one wants to read things that are boring to them.
6. Surprise students.
Laufenberg would often start class by putting a primary source document up on the screen with no context. Students would come in and immediately get to work trying to figure out what the document was and where it came from. She says it was a great window into their thinking and questioning skills.

"Sometimes you can use really little projects to get their minds spinning on all the ways of knowing, and then model those for each other," Laufenberg said. Not all the students will find the answer, but they'll be curious to know how others did. Laufenberg calls activities like this "micro bursts of inquiry."
7. The traditional model of imparting knowledge isn't working very well, so don't be afraid to try out inquiry.
"When people don't want to do it I always tell them to pick the unit you know always falls flat," Laufenberg said. "You're not going to lose; they're already not with you." It's a safe place to start because it can't get worse and maybe some learnings will come out of the experiment that can inform other lessons.
8. Find the "bend" in the outcomes and abandon the prescriptive path.
Laufenberg recommends finding "the bend" by paring down the content to the most essential pieces and focusing on them thematically. That will help open up as many paths as possible for students to arrive at the big ideas that kids need to learn. When teachers assign a "project" that follows the pacing guide, has a definable outcome and which results in 30 assignments that all look the same, it's not inquiry. SLA principal Chris Lehmann calls that "the recipe." In a true inquiry-based assignment students will travel different paths to and produce different products, but learn along the way.

"In a non-inquiry classroom the kids will all walk the same path because the teacher has decided where everybody is going and nothing that anybody says all day long will alter that," Laufenberg said.
9. Indulge interesting student questions even if it doesn't fit the pacing guide.
Laufenberg has seen classrooms where a student asks a fascinating question that the teacher brushes off because there's not enough time. Kids know when there's nothing they can do to influence the direction of the lesson, a distinctly disempowering experience.

"Who that child is isn't informing the path and that's the most devastating part," Laufenberg said. Listening to student questions and validating them by asking them of the whole group has the added value of building student confidence and highlighting the value of wondering.
10. Approach the practice of teaching with inquiry and use that meta-practice to improve.

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10 Tips For Launching An Inquiry-Based Classroom | KQED

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"At the end of it they may have consumed less content, but remember more of the sum total," Laufenberg said. "And they end up in a better place." 2. Don't tell students what they should know; create the structure for them to experience it on their own.

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Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes

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Ron Ritchhart is a Senior Research Associate and Principal Investigator at Harvard Project Zero where his work focuses on the development of school and classroom culture as prime vehicles for developing students' as powerful thinkers and learners. Ron's research and writing have done much to transform the educational landscape around the world.

Ron's newest book, co-auhtored with Mark Church, The Power of Making Thinking Visible, captures the effect making thinking visible practices can have on teaching and learning from promoting dispositional development to nurturing deeper learning and better academic performance. The book also introduces 18 new thinking routines that Ron developed, piloted, and documented in classrooms around the world.

Ron's book, Creating Cultures of Thinking, takes readers inside a diverse range of learning environments to show how teachers create classrooms where thinking is valued, visible and actively promoted as part of the day to day experience of all group members. Howard Gardner has called the book " a tour de force" for Ron's ability to seamlessly merge theory, research, practice and application together in a highly accessible and engaging manner.

His book Making Thinking Visible, co-written with Mark Church and Karin Morrison, has popularized the use of thinking routines to facilitate deep learning and high engagement. He and his colleagues are currently working on a second volume of Making Thinking Visible in which they will introduce a new set of routines and share what they have learned about the successful integration of thinking routines as a powerful teaching tool.

Find out more about Ron's research and writing by visiting ronritchhart.com

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Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners

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Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners [Ritchhart, Ron, Church, Mark, Morrison, Karin, Perkins, David] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners

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Critical Thinking & Inquiry - ACPS Talent Development

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Thinking Routines

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a place for wonder: reading and writing nonfiction in the primary grades

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english language - composition and exercises - study and teaching (primary) - united states

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nature study - activity programs - united states

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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education/teaching methods & materials - language arts

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teaching methods & materials - language arts

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teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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classroom management; curiosity; creativity; exploration; life-long learners; critical thinking; wonder centers; nonfiction reading; nonfiction writing

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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education/teaching methods & materials - language arts

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teaching methods & materials - language arts

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teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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A Place for Wonder: Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades

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In A Place for Wonder, Georgia Heard and Jennifer McDonough discuss how to create "a landscape of wonder," a primary classroom where curiosity, creativity, and exploration are encouraged. For it is these characteristics, the authors write, that develop intelligent, inquiring, life-lon...

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Inquiry Through Play

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Children are constantly engaged in making meaning of their world and in sharing their perceptions. Play is an optimal context for enabling children to work out their ideas and theories and use what they already know to deepen their understanding and further their learning. Innately curious, children explore, manipulate, build, create, wonder, and ask questions naturally, moving through the world in what might be called an "inquiry stance". Educators observe and document the children's thinking, ideas, and learning; interpret and analyse what they have noticed; and express their own thinking and wondering as they interact with the children. In a Kindergarten classroom, the educators adopt an inquiry stance along with the children, and a culture of inquiry characterizes the learning environment.

Inquiry is an integral part of certain disciplines. For example, inquiry processes and skills are central to science and technology. However, in the Kindergarten program, inquiry is not a set of processes and skills but a pervasive approach or "stance", a habit of mind that permeates all thinking and learning throughout the day. It is not limited to a subject area or topic, a project, or a particular time of day. It is not an occasional classroom event, and it is not an approach appropriate for only some children. As noted in the curriculum policy document for each discipline in the Ontario curriculum, inquiry is "at the heart of learning in all subject areas". Educators use their professional knowledge and skills to co-construct inquiry with the children - that is, to support children's learning through play, using an inquiry approach.

Play as the optimal context for learning: Evidence from research

Play nourishes every aspect of children's development. ... Play develops the foundation of intellectual, social, physical, and emotional skills necessary for success in school and in life. It "paves the way for learning". (Canadian Council on Learning, 2006, p. 2)

Play is a vehicle for learning and rests at the core of innovation and creativity. It provides opportunities for learning in a context in which children are at their most receptive. Play and academic work are not distinct categories for young children, and learning and doing are also inextricably linked for them. It has long been acknowledged that there is a strong link between play and learning for young children, especially in the areas of problem solving, language acquisition, literacy, and mathematics, as well as the development of social, physical, and emotional skills ( NAEYC, 2009; Fullan, 2013; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014c).

Young children actively explore their environment and the world around them through play. When children are exploring ideas and language, manipulating objects, acting out roles, or experimenting with various materials, they are engaged in learning through play. Play, therefore, has an important role in learning and can be used to further children's learning in all areas of the Kindergarten program.

How do children learn through play?

In its "Statement on Play-Based Learning", the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada ( CMEC), recognizes the educational value of play as follows:

The benefits of play are recognized by the scientific community. There is now evidence that neural pathways in children's brains are influenced by and advanced in their development through the exploration, thinking skills, problem solving, and language expression that occur during play.

Research also demonstrates that play-based learning leads to greater social, emotional, and academic success. Based on such evidence, ministers of education endorse a sustainable pedagogy for the future that does not separate play from learning but brings them together to promote creativity in future generations. In fact, play is considered so essential to healthy development that the United Nations has recognized it as a specific right for all children. ...

Given the evidence, the CMEC believes in the intrinsic value and importance of play and its relationship to learning. Educators should intentionally plan and create challenging, dynamic, play-based learning opportunities. Intentional teaching is the opposite of teaching by rote or continuing with traditions simply because things have always been done that way. Intentional teaching involves educators' being deliberate and purposeful in creating play-based learning environments - because when children are playing, children are learning.

The process through which learning happens in play is complex. Educators continually develop and deepen their understanding of that process through professional learning and classroom observation, interpretation, and analysis. To be effective, educators depend on their nuanced understanding of the many ways in which children learn and develop and how children's grasp of concepts is revealed during play (Trawick-Smith & Dziurgot, 2010). Educators also realize how critical their role is in helping to consolidate and further children's learning in play by making their learning visible to the children, as well as to their families.
Educator team reflections
It was important for our educator teams to understand and express our beliefs and have courageous conversations about play-based learning. Even though we all believed that play was important, there was a range of opinion as to what it meant. Some of us had training that said: When children are at play, adults should be "hands off". Others had experienced play as what the children do while the teacher is busy working with ("teaching") a small group. We studied the description that was offered at a professional learning session on the Kindergarten program and began to rethink play as a critical context for learning. We all agreed to study our role in play.

We had to rethink what was meant by "play". We believed the activities we used to plan were play. Every child had to complete a "cookie-cutter" craft - but the activity never really met the children's needs. They would either rush through it, or we would end up coaxing them to complete the craft - otherwise, we would have to explain to their parents why they hadn't completed it! At first, we worried about removing these activities, but when we began to offer the children materials so they could choose how to represent their thinking, we realized that they were much more capable as artists than we had thought. We are amazed every day at the complex pieces they are creating.

Kindergarten classrooms make use of play and embed opportunities for learning through play in the physical environment ( ELECT, 2007, p. 15; see also Chapter 1.3, "The Learning Environment"). The learning experiences are designed by the educators to encourage the children to think creatively, to explore and investigate, to solve problems, self-regulate, and engage in the inquiry process, and to share their learning with others.
Educator team reflection
I was uncertain of my role in the children's play - I thought it was my role to set up play activities and then supervise and react, but I worried that I might take over the play if I interacted with the children. Now, we are learning about documentation and figuring out our role. We find time in the day - and have made it a priority - to study our documentation together. We have a deeper understanding of the children's learning, and we are really thinking together about how we might respond, extend, and challenge the children's thinking ... and our own!

Play-based learning: The connections to self-regulation

When children are fully engaged in their play, their activity and learning ... [are] integrated across developmental domains. They seek out challenges that can be accomplished ... Through play, children learn trust, empathy, and social skills. (Pascal, 2009a, pp. 8‑9)

Vygotsky (1978) connects socio-dramatic play ("pretend" play) to children's developing self-regulation. During socio-dramatic play, children naturally engage in learning that is in their "zone of proximal development" - in other words, learning that is at the "edge" of their capacities. Evidence may be seen in various play contexts in the classroom - children may be noticing for the first time that they can influence how water moves through a tube, that their shadow moves when they move, or how it feels to move a paintbrush over a canvas. As they notice and build on their insights, they are regulating their own learning.

In socio-dramatic play, language becomes a self-regulatory tool. Children's private speech, or self-talk, is a mode through which they shift from external regulation ( e.g., by a family member or educator) to self-regulation. Children begin to assimilate adult prompts, descriptions, explanations, and strategies by incorporating them into their self-talk. As they integrate the language they have heard into their own private speech, they are activating complex cognitive processes such as attention, memory, planning, and self-direction (Shanker, 2013b). Participants in socio-dramatic play communicate with each other using language and symbolic gestures to describe and extrapolate from familiar experiences, and to imagine and create new stories. Socio-dramatic play supports children's self-regulation and increases their potential to learn as they engage with the people and resources in their environment (Pascal, 2009a).

"A play-based approach to learning is important in developing children's self-regulation"

"Play-based learning creates a passion for learning"

"Rethinking and repeating supporting self-regulation - one educator team's reflection"

The inquiry approach: Evidence from research

Research suggests that students are more likely to develop as engaged, self-directed learners in inquiry-based classrooms (Jang, Reeve, & Deci, 2010).

Inquiry allows students to make decisions about their learning and to take responsibility for it. [Educators] create learning contexts that allow children to make decisions about their learning processes and about how they will demonstrate their learning. They encourage collaborative learning and create intellectual spaces for students to engage in rich talk about their thinking and learning. They create a classroom ethos that fosters respect for others' ideas and opinions and encourages risk-taking. ... Collectively, these actions lead to a strong sense of student self-efficacy. (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2011, p. 4)

Asking questions and making sense of information to expand understanding are at the core of all inquiry. Through its focus on an inquiry approach, the Kindergarten program promotes the development of higher-order thinking skills by capitalizing on children's natural curiosity, their innate sense of wonder and awe, and their desire to make sense of their environment. An inquiry approach nurtures children's natural inquisitiveness. As educators give children opportunities to seek answers to questions that are interesting, important, and relevant to them, they are enabling them to address curriculum content in integrated, "real world" ways and to develop - and practise - the higher-order thinking skills and habits of mind that lead to deep learning.
Read:

"What does inquiry-based learning look like and sound like? How are educator teams repeating, removing, and rethinking their theme-based planning and moving to inquiry?"

"Reflections from another FDELK team on moving from themes to inquiry. What did they notice?"

"How are educator teams repeating, removing and rethinking their inquiry-based planning?"

Play-based learning in an inquiry stance

As noted above, educators in a Kindergarten classroom adopt an inquiry stance - a mindset of questioning and wondering - alongside the children, to support their learning as they exercise their natural curiosity. In addition to joining the children in inquiry, educators, as "classroom researchers", wonder and ask questions about the children and the children's learning ( e.g., "Why this learning for this child at this time and in this context?") and about the impact of their interventions on children's learning and growth in learning ( e.g., "What will be the impact on the learning of these children if I intervene in their conversation in this way at this time?", "How might changing the way we use the tables in the classroom affect the way the children collaborate?"). Being in an inquiry stance is critical to creating the conditions required for inquiry learning.

As educators question and wonder along with the children, they bear in mind the intention for learning - which, in any given context, will involve one or more of the overall expectations (OEs) set out in this document (see Chapter 4.2). The educators do not plan lessons based on predetermined topics at predetermined times ( e.g., topics based on the calendar, such as Mother's Day in May, Thanksgiving in October), and they do not develop lessons or activities around the "nouns" that the children happen to use ( e.g., rocks, trains, tadpoles), as was often done in the past. Instead, inquiries evolve out of reciprocal questioning and wondering. As the children express their thinking, educators think about questions they can ask that will further provoke children's thinking and continue to stimulate their curiosity and wonder.

For example, a child might bring some tadpoles to school. As the child voices questions, ideas, facts, and opinions about them, other children who are interested in the tadpoles might join in. The educators engage the children about their questions and ideas, probing for more details and clarification from them. Rather than providing information about the tadpoles, they wonder out loud about how, together, they might find answers to some of the questions. One of the children might express the idea that tadpoles turn into frogs. Through a probing question such as "How could we find out if that's what happens?", the educators can elicit ideas, and the group might decide to observe the tadpoles over a period of time and to record what they observe (). Together, the educators and the children consider the many ways in which the children could represent their observations and ideas ( e.g., in a drawing or a model, or by acting them out) and the kinds of tools and equipment they will need to do this. They might also discuss the care they will need to provide for the tadpoles. At this point, other children might be invited to be part of the inquiry as well. The educators might probe to find out what bigger questions underlie the children's interest - what does it mean to develop? To transform? What is happening on the inside of the tadpole while it changes on the outside? The educators might also choose to provoke further inquiry by providing opportunities for the children to explore other similar kinds of changes or stages of life that happen - for example, in seeds, in eggs, and even in humans. Once the inquiry is under way, the observations would need to be recorded - and this would become a purpose for writing and an opportunity for the children to learn about an important element of the writing process ( and ).

Using questions to promote inquiry and extend thinking

In response to children's questions and ideas, educators pose questions such as:

What do you think?

What would happen if ...?

I wonder why your measurement is different from Jasmine's?

How are you getting water from one container to another?

How could you show your idea? How can we find out if your idea works?

I wonder if we could make our own marble run?

Children ask questions that lead to inquiry. For example:

How can this car go faster down the ramp?

Where are the biggest puddles?

Children communicate ideas and ask further questions while they are experimenting and investigating. They might describe materials they are using, indicate a problem they are having, or ask a question such as "I wonder what would happen if I ...?" They begin to listen to their peers and may offer suggestions to them. Through these interactions and as the educators extend children's thinking through their questions and observations, children also learn to make predictions and draw conclusions:

"I think if I use a bigger block on the bottom, my tower won't break. See, it worked! I used this big block and it didn't fall over."

"I thought it would take six footsteps, but it took ten."

The educators engage with the children in inquiries that enable the children to explore their questions and wonderings as co-learners with the educators. The educators offer provocations that build on the children's thinking or invite the children to engage in new ways of learning.

Further to the example about tadpoles above, the educators might point out to the children that scientists investigate things they are interested in, and that the children now have an opportunity to "be" scientists as well. The educators will have placed hand lenses and recording materials at a table with the tadpoles, pointing out to the children that they are using the same tools that scientists use. They might also mention that the children are using the same processes that scientists use ( e.g., observing, wondering, asking questions and generating theories, communicating, working together). As the children conduct their investigation, the educators observe and document what they say and do. The educators confer about the documentation and then reflect on it with the children, negotiating what materials the children might add or take away in order to further test their theories about the tadpoles and build on their thinking.

For more information about pedagogical documentation, see Chapter 1.4, "Assessment and Learning in Kindergarten".

"What does it look like and sound like to co-construct inquiry with the children? Reflections on inquiry: Observations and making learning visible"

"What does it look like and sound like to co-construct inquiry with the children? Listening in on a classroom inquiry"

Questions to guide video viewing

What could the conversation be while watching the video (e.g., recalling a moment when you have rethought some aspect of your program)?

How did the learning change when the educators trusted their judgement and rethought their intervention?

The following chart outlines the elements of the inquiry process in the Kindergarten classroom, describing the actions of both the children and the educators.

The Inquiry Process in the Kindergarten Classroom

Elements of the child's inquiry process

When children are engaged in the inquiry process, they:

When educators are modelling or supporting the inquiry process, they:

Initial engagement - noticing, wondering, playing

raise questions about objects and events around them

Exploration - exploring, observing, questioning

explore objects and events around them and observe the results of their explorations

make observations, using all of their senses, and generate questions

act as co-learners with the children, posing thoughtful, open-ended questions

encourage children to observe and talk among themselves and to the educators

Investigation - planning, using observations, reflecting

gather, compare, sort, classify, order, interpret, describe observable characteristics and properties, notice patterns, and draw conclusions, using a variety of simple tools and materials

provide a rich variety of materials and resources, and strategically question and observe children to discover, clarify, and expand on the children's thinking

model how to plan, observe, and reflect

Communication - sharing findings, discussing ideas

work individually and with others, share and discuss ideas, and listen to ideas

listen to the children to help them make connections between their prior knowledge and new discoveries

Questions for reflection: How well are we supporting the children's inquiry?

How does inquiry evolve in both our indoor and outdoor classroom?

What does inquiry in our indoor and outdoor classroom look like/sound like?

Is there sufficient time for the children to engage deeply in play and inquiry? How do we know?

How will we communicate our play-based inquiry process to any educator who stands in for us in the classroom (e.g., our planning-time teacher)?

What is it about our learning environment that makes it conducive to inquiry and supports inquiry-based learning?

Does this material lead to rich and engaging inquiries? What makes it stimulating?

The critical role of the educator team: Co-constructing inquiry and learning

[W]e must abandon our idea of a static, knowable educator and move on to a view of an educator in a state of constant change and becoming. The role of the educator shifts from a communicator of knowledge to a listener, provocateur, documenter, and negotiator of meaning. (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2009, p. 103)

The examples in the previous section illustrate how educators, in their interactions with the children, constantly engage in a creative collaboration with them to co-construct thinking and learning. The process can be summarized as follows:

As educators collaborate with the children to:

formulate questions,

select materials,

stimulate and support creativity,

think aloud about various perspectives and interpretations,

think aloud about multiple possibilities or solutions,

solve problems, and

document thinking and learning,

they intentionally and purposefully:

listen,

observe,

document,

analyse documentation, considering a range of possible meanings and perspectives and making connections to the overall expectations, and

provide feedback through questions and prompts that effectively extend thinking and learning.

Educators strive to internalize the overall expectations, reviewing the conceptual understandings that accompany them to see the broader ideas, skills, and understandings that flow from them. Educators keep the overall expectations in mind as they interact with the children in play and inquiry.

The educators use their observations and documentation of the children's thinking and learning to seek multiple perspectives - including those of the children themselves, the parents and other family members, and colleagues. The information gleaned from these various perspectives can provide greater insight into the children's thinking and learning, enabling the educators to make the kinds of connections and pose the kinds of questions and prompts that will most effectively support and extend the children's learning.

As the educators interact with the children, they respond to, clarify, challenge, and expand on their thinking. They negotiate the selection of a rich variety of materials and resources for them to use, and co-construct the children's inquiry with them.

As children move naturally from noticing and wondering about the objects and occurrences around them to exploring, observing, and questioning in a more focused way, the educators document their thinking, what they are wondering about, their theories, and the ideas that pique their interest. They interpret and analyse the documentation to support their own inquiry and learning about how the children learn. Their analysis, which focuses on how the children's thinking and learning relates to the overall expectations, informs the choices educators will make about how to further challenge and extend the children's thinking and learning. It also serves as a guide to the level and type of support each child needs. The educators' documentation and analysis make children's thinking and learning visible and inform the path that educators take to support individual children's learning.

For further information, see Chapter 1.4, "Assessment and Learning in Kindergarten".

Figure 4. This graphic depicts the interdependent roles of children and educators in play-based learning. It identifies the various ways in which children and educators engage throughout the day, showing their roles in the co-construction of learning.

Questions for reflection

As we observe and document, then review and analyse our documentation to determine next steps for a particular child's or group of children's learning, we ask ourselves questions such as the following:

How can we find out what this child might be thinking?

Why have we chosen this learning for this child at this time in this context?

How is this child constructing knowledge with other children? In what ways does the child participate and contribute?

How is this child's approach to a problem different now from what it was earlier?

How does the evidence we've gathered help us determine the next steps in learning for the child?

Literacy in an inquiry stance

How are the children using letters in their play?

What do they know about their names?

How do they approach text in a book? How do they respond to text that they see in the environment?

How do they use language when they negotiate, debate, describe, order, count, predict, make suppositions, or theorize?

How do they use drawing and/or writing (graphic representation) to capture memory, describe experiences, represent thinking, negotiate, list, and label?

How do they bring social narratives into their play?

How do they bring retells and recounts into their play?

Mathematics in an inquiry stance

How do the children reveal their knowledge and thinking about quantity relationships?

What does the way they use materials/manipulatives reveal about their mathematical thinking?

How do they think about measurement and about the ways we use it in various familiar contexts? How do they reveal their thinking about measurement?

What do they think about what makes a pattern?

What do they think about why we collect data (e.g., to inform us, to help us make decisions about something)? What are their ideas about how to collect data (e.g., taking surveys)?

How do they reveal their thinking about shapes and spatial relationships?

How does the inquiry approach differ from theme-based or unit planning?

Traditional planning models asked educators to develop "themes" or teaching units composed of several lesson plans with stated objectives, the relevant program/curriculum learning expectations, and materials lists. Kindergarten programs were traditionally structured around monthly themes related to seasonal events and celebrations, and resource books supporting such themes have provided related activities that adults believed would appeal to early learners. Such planning models and associated resources, all based on adult perceptions of children's interests and learning, have been shown to have a negative effect on children's engagement (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998; Wells, 2001).
Educator team reflection
At a recent professional learning session, I began to feel uncomfortable about how closely one of the planning models we were asked to critique aligned with the plans I had been using for several years. As our group began to reflect, we wondered if the way we had always planned made sense from the children's point of view. I reflected that I had often felt somewhat limited by plans that were based on the monthly calendar. I had always assumed that the children were interested in the monthly topics I had chosen - but had I ever asked them what they were interested in? And were they really able to think deeply and concretely about topics outside their direct experience, such as polar bears and the rainforest?

Traditional planning versus an inquiry-based approach

Traditional planning

Inquiry-based approach

Topics are decided by educators (e.g., apples, Thanksgiving, dinosaurs).

Topics change on a monthly basis.

Decision making and planning involve little or no input from the children.

Planning is often related to calendar events and topics traditionally perceived as interesting to all young children.

Planning is heavily focused on specific expectations rather than on overall expectations.

Children all complete the same activities (e.g., apple or pumpkin booklets, standardized generic crafts), regardless of individual interests and needs.

There is a focus on standardized procedures and task completion.

Topics are often abstract from the children's perspective (e.g., polar bears, dinosaurs), making it difficult for them to engage in higher-level thinking.

The children are asked to make contrived connections (e.g., identifying words that start with the letter a; working on an apple booklet).

Planning often involves a Community Helper theme.

The focus of inquiries emerges out of children's thinking, wonderings, and theories, as well as ideas that pique their interest.

The duration of inquiries is not predetermined, and is flexible.

Experiences, materials, thinking, and learning are co-constructed with the children.

Educators focus on the overall expectations as they co-construct learning with the children.

Learning is personalized and differentiated.

There is a focus on providing opportunities for children to test their own theories and explore answers to their own questions and wonderings.

Children explore their own questions and ideas more deeply and directly, and so engage more readily in higher-level thinking (e.g., How does water move? Where do people read? Where do we find numbers?).

The concepts of citizenship and social justice emerge out of an inquiry stance (e.g., How does my behaviour affect my friends and family and other people in my community?).

Misconceptions about play-based learning

That play-based learning that "follows the children's lead" means that the educators do not take an active role in designing children's learning experiences as they collaborate with them in play or that they do not intentionally and purposefully inject planned opportunities for challenging and extending children's thinking and learning

That play happens after or apart from learning

That literacy and mathematics are neglected in a play-based context

That play does not involve group work

That play is always hands-on and physically active

That play is either teacher-initiated or child-initiated (rather than being a fluid, negotiated engagement)

Misconceptions about learning and teaching in an inquiry stance

That the educators listen for every topic the children are interested in and use each one as a topic of inquiry, or that they pursue all of the fleeting and ever-changing interests of the children

That inquiry should begin with or be limited to topics found in non-fiction texts

That the educators' role is to pick a broad topic (e.g., forest animals) and have the children select some aspect of the topic to explore (e.g., a particular animal)

That only the children can generate ideas for inquiry, provoke thinking, or ask questions

That inquiry involves a project or is conducted at a particular time in the day

That the children determine what they will learn

Communicating with parents and families about play-based learning

Play-based learning supports growth in the language and culture of children and their families.

Play-based learning is the foundation of the Kindergarten program in Ontario. The concept of learning through play means different things to different people, especially to the parents and families of the children. It is therefore important for educators to have a clear understanding of play-based learning in the Ontario context, in order to be able to explain it to families, colleagues, and community partners. A shared understanding of how learning takes place through play can encourage family members and community partners to support play at home, and in community settings as well, and can help expand children's opportunities for play and learning.

See "Fundamental Principles of Play-Based Learning", in Chapter 1.1, "Introduction".

Family members want to understand how their children develop and learn. They normally welcome and benefit from educators' observations and information about how to support their children's learning. When speaking informally to families, and during classroom visits, educators can make the links between play and learning by sharing their observations in the moment. For example:

Amalla is learning about symmetry as she builds with the blocks today. Let's ask her to tell us what she notices about her structure.

When he was playing a card game with some of the other children, Jerome learned about taking turns.

Families also have valuable insights into their own children. When educators foster a more reciprocal relationship with families, both educators and families will have a more complex understanding of the children.

Children communicate and represent their learning with one another and with the educators in the context of their play and inquiry. The educators also provide more formal opportunities - for example, in child-led family conferences - for children to share their learning with their families through the documentation they and the educators have created, shared, and discussed.

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1.2 Play-based learning in a culture of inquiry

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Children are constantly engaged in making meaning of their world and in sharing their perceptions. Play is an optimal context for enabling children to work out their ideas and theories and use what they already know to deepen their understanding and further their learning.

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Opening Keynote - Smokey Daniels and Sara Ahmed

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What really matters to your students? They might say the issues in front of them at school and in life. When students inquire into those issues and they're given an opportunity for their arguments to be read by the city council or published in the local newspaper, they're eager to research and find relevant information in nonfiction texts to bolster their claims. They become committed to writing, revising, editing and correcting their grammar. They want to think broadly about what reasoning will be effective with their audience. Whether you teach English, social studies, science, or math. From Inquiry to Action by Steve Zemelman's helps students become, not only college and career ready, but citizen ready. From Inquiry to Action offers practical guidance that leads students to grow as engaged, thoughtful citizens in our communities. We started our conversation on what civic action in schools looks like?

Read Steve's blog here.
See below for a full transcript of our conversation:
Steve Zemelman: In one classroom, high school teacher's kids were thinking about what was important to them, what concerned them, and they decided that the big issue they wanted to address was student date violence. They discovered, doing some research, that there was curriculum about this for high school classes. They looked at it, and being teenagers, they didn't like any of it. You know how teenagers are, they roll their eyes, "Oh, this is dorky." They decided to design their own, and they did. Then they piloted it with some teachers right in their school, and refined it from there. Then they went to the school board, made a presentation about this, and the school board said, "You got to talk to our CEO of schools." They went and they did that, and he agreed to make it an accepted part of the social studies curriculum in the city.

Brett: How can a student civic engagement lead to classroom engagement?

Steve Zemelman: When teachers look at a project like this involving civic action, they might wonder how it connects with what they're trying to make happen in the classroom, and engagement is a big part of that. When students are doing these projects, they are doing all kinds of academic work. They're researching the issue, they're researching the governmental agencies that they may be trying to influence, they're writing speeches, they're writing letters, they're finding ways to collaborate with each other, they're disagreeing about issues and finding ways to settle those conflicts. Those are all academic skills, and classroom skills that students have to develop, but they're doing it with a passion because they're concerned about that issue. They are engaged in this work, and yet it's academic work. What I want to say is that engagement in civic action is classroom engagement.

Brett: How have you seen this work benefit students?

Steve Zemelman: When we think about benefits for students doing this kind of work, well, classroom engagement, which I just mentioned is one of the benefits, but there are a number of others that are really, really important that make me feel like this kind of classroom work should be going on at least some of the time in classrooms in all schools, because we really need it. What are some of these benefits? Well one is that students become much more involved in school. There is one scene where a visitor was asking a child, a fifth grader, about this work, and he said, "Well, how do you feel about school doing this work?" The kid said back to her, "This ain't school, this is important." Students become more committed to school, and to what they're learning, and that's a tremendous benefit.

Another big one is that they are learning to become responsible active citizens. That involves not only commitment, but skills. They're gaining skills that they can use in their community, in their school to make it a better place. Then the larger benefit that is a benefit to them, but to all of us, is that we are gaining able, and well-trained, and active citizens. At a time in this country when there's so much cynicism about public action, about government, about schooling, about almost everything beyond individuals and work. This enables students to become people who if they see an issue in their community, are able to try to make change, instead of just complain and become cynical about it. That's a benefit to them, and to all of us, and that's why we need this done.

Brett: With this work, what is the teacher's role?

Steve Zemelman: Teachers have to think carefully about their roles, and the teacher's essential. At the same time, students have to take ownership, and make decisions, and sometimes make mistakes, and figure things out on their own. At least one teacher whose work is described in the book said to me, "If I do everything for them and help them with everything now, they'll never be able to do it on their own." That doesn't mean having them just suffer and become frustrated, but it does mean that the teacher has to step back, and then make decisions about when it's important to step in and help. For example, in one classroom that I was observing, the kids had a strong disagreement about what issue to tackle, and the class kind of divided into two camps.

The teacher had to decide whether to pressure them to make a decision, because she wanted the whole class to work together, but ultimately she decided, "You know what? They're not going to be happy with it," so she stepped in and said, "All right. We'll have two groups, and this group will work on its issue, and the other on it," so she made that strategic decision. Teachers learn to do that as these projects are going. Sometimes they have to step in, and help, and do a lesson, like how do you write a biography, a short biography of an active citizen in your community? Well they did a lesson on that, so the students could compile a book of activists in their neighborhood. There are times when you have to do direct lessons, and other times when you step back and let the students figure it out.

Brett: How have you seen this work make a difference in the world?

Steve Zemelman: The aim of these projects is to make a difference in the school, or the community, and sometimes students are successful with this. For example, one fifth grade girl in a school that I visited decided ... In that classroom, students were doing projects individually. She was concerned about students who had some disabilities, and she thought they felt isolated, and she decided that she would organize fellow students to become mentors to those struggling students. Now that is a difference. It's not in the whole world, but it certainly is right in her community. It isn't just the service, it's developing a structure to make things different in that school. Those thing are sometimes possible. Now at the same time, it often happens that the effort isn't successful because students are tackling something that's really different.

For example, in one classroom the students had learned that in courtroom trials of juveniles where there's a serious crime in Illinois, the cases are automatically reverted to adult court. They waive their right to a juvenile court. A lot of people feel that this is very unfair. In fact, it turned out, they discovered that there was a bill in the Illinois House of Representatives to change the law on that. Of course, they had to learn about how the legislature works, which ordinarily would have been something they'd read about in a textbook, take a quiz, and then totally forget. They're never going to forget this. What they discovered was that the bill was in the rules committee. What they then discovered is in, and I'm sure this is true in many legislatures, the rules committee is a place bills go to die. That's exactly what happened.

You could imagine that the kids could get very discouraged. Here they were getting all ready to try to lobby representatives on this bill, and then they discover that there's a deadline, session is over, and the bill never went anywhere and it's dead. What happened is, and I think it's the teacher who arranged this, that there was an organization working on this very issue, so the teacher brought in the head of that organization to talk to the kids about the work the group was doing. Now the kids could see that even though they hadn't succeeded in their specific effort, they could work with this group to continue on this issue. Teachers have to look for ways to help kids, because they do get discouraged, and to bring in activists who talk about, "Here's what I do when I get discouraged," and to encourage the kids, "Look, this is hard work, it won't always work out, but you're doing the right thing." The kids really believe in that.

Brett: Steve, talk about the difference between the civic action and community service.

Steve Zemelman: It often happens that people confuse civic action with community service. Community service is a wonderful thing, and it does help make students responsible, and realize that they're things they can do. Most community service is one off kind of effort, like say, serving in a soup kitchen, and it's a wonderful thing, and people should be doing that. The thing about it, in an example like that, is it doesn't actually change any structures in the community, it doesn't do anything that's permanent. These efforts that we see in civic action projects are aimed at doing that in small or larger ways. One example of students who, this was not so much in a classroom, it was actually a city wide committee of high school students who discovered that juveniles, teenagers, when they have arrest records, the records end up on databases throughout the state of Illinois. There are rules that allow juveniles to get these records expunged when they're eighteen years old, but nobody would do it, because it was too complicated. The students worked with some techie people and designed an app that walks people through the whole process. It's a service, but it actually changes things because it makes a structure that was available possible for people to actually use.

Brett: My thanks to Steve Zemelman for talking with us today. You can find out more about his book, From Inquiry to Action, by going to Heinemann.com. Be sure to read more of Steve's blog on Medium.com, and follow him on Twitter. If you like our podcast, be sure to go onto the iTunes store and comment or share with others, be sure to give us a five-star rating, and don't forget to share about the podcast on Twitter or Facebook, and be sure to join our Facebook page as well. Thanks for listening. If you have any ideas for future Heinemann podcasts, be sure to email it to us, socialmedia@heinemann.com. Thanks for listening.

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From Inquiry to Action by Steve Zemelman

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What really matters to your students? They might say the issues in front of them at school and in life. When students inquire into those issues and they're given an opportunity for their arguments to be read by the city council or published in the local newspaper, they're eager to research and find relevant information in nonfiction texts to bolster their claims. They become committed to writing, revising, editing and correcting their grammar.

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In the new and revised edition of Comprehension and Collaboration, Stephanie Harvey and Harvey "Smokey" Daniels share inquiry units of increasing richness with all the teaching and planning resources you need.

In today's blog, Steph presents a brief overview of the book's structure, and explains the role of teachers in inquiry projects:

We know that adopting the inquiry approach means dropping some familiar teacher roles-lecturer, font of all wisdom, center of attention-for at least parts of the day. How do we remain active and supportive while giving real responsibility and control to our students?

In inquiry circles, the teacher:

Exemplifies and celebrates curiosity, which is at the heart of inquiry-based learning

Models his/her own inquiry process from start to finish

Encourages authentic questions

Offers lessons in comprehension, collaboration, and inquiry

Shares examples of how inquiry happens in the real world

Stays alert to inquiry circle topics and searches for relevant texts and resources

Keeps the curriculum in mind and connects it to group inquiry

Helps students locate, organize, and use resources

Monitors group and individual work plans and schedules

Regularly meets and confers with groups about their progress

Observes groups at work and gives feedback to students

Acts as a coach or referee depending on the circumstances

Supports kids in taking action beyond the classroom

Responds to and assesses individual and group work

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Comprehension and Collaboration, Revised Edition ships in late June. Get pre-publication savings with coupon code CANDC2.

Stephanie Harvey has spent her career teaching and learning about reading and writing. Harvey "Smokey" Daniels has been a city and suburban classroom teacher and a college professor, and now works as a national consultant and author on literacy education.
Click here to view our official page for Comprehension and Collaboration, Revised Edition
Follow @smokeylit Follow @Stephharvey49

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How Steph and Smokey Help You Make Inquiry Work

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In the new and revised edition of Comprehension and Collaboration, Stephanie Harvey and Harvey "Smokey" Daniels share inquiry units of increasing richness with all the teaching and planning resources you need.

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"Inquiry sounds rigorous and authentic, but it also sounds hard to manage." As an advocate of learning through inquiry, I hear that a lot. I think it's because inquiry seems too different from what many teachers currently do in their classroom. Yes, inquiry is different, but that doesn't mean it's too hard to do. Don't believe me? Try this.

An easy way to introduce inquiry is to start your school day with an exploration (a curricular structure in which students work on projects of their choice) that transitions into morning meeting. Because there is often a significant time difference between when the first and last child arrive each morning, devoting the first half hour to exploration gives you a chance to touch base with each child and gives kids a chance to work independently or in small groups until everyone is assembled. It's a calm, productive way to start the day.

Explorations are an opportunity for children to inquire about something that sparks their curiosity and will help them grow as learners and as people. The key is choice. Students read independently or together, work on pieces they are preparing for publication, play chess or other games, conduct experiments, and write observations or pose questions in a class journal. It's not enough simply to offer diverse materials for children to explore, however. For explorations to be successful, teachers first need to introduce each activity individually and let students practice it as a class. Then, when children understand how to use a strategy or material, it is added to the class list of exploration choices. For example, Tim O'Keefe teaches his second and third graders how to play chess because it demonstrates the importance of developing strategies and promotes good sportsmanship. Chess becomes an exploration choice once Tim is confident his students understand how to play the game.

In this video clip, Tim and a small group of children collaboratively reconstruct the skeleton of a dead bat they had buried five months earlier.

Notice how Tim and his students exchange exploratory comments and questions, moving fluidly in and out of mentor and apprentice roles as they use the language of inquiry: I noticed... ; I wonder... ; I made a connection... ; I appreciated... ; I have a feeling... ; I was surprised by... ; This reminds me of...

What's most striking is how individual insights become part of the collective understanding. The group members are reaching beyond their current understanding. They consult their classmate William, who knows a lot about bats from an expert project he completed in first grade. They also use nature magazines and the Internet to explore their emerging questions.

An inquiry-based biology unit launched this work, but units often emerge from what happens during an exploration as well. Let the process of inquiry inspire and inform you and your students.

For more on how to make inquiry work in your classroom, see Heidi's new book, Learning for Real. The book and its companion resource, which includes teaching demonstrations and possible units, provide clear, actionable ideas on how to develop five habits of inquiry that define lifelong learning:

* Carefully observe the world using the tools and strategies of a discipline.

* Pose questions and investigate problems from numerous perspectives.

* Obtain information and evidence from primary and secondary sources, narrative as well as nonnarrative.

* Use the language of inquiry while reflecting on and sharing new learning with others.

* Employ reflection and self-evaluation to grow and change.

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Unsure How to Begin Inquiry Work in Your Classroom? by Heidi Mills

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"Inquiry sounds rigorous and authentic, but it also sounds hard to manage." As an advocate of learning through inquiry, I hear that a lot. I think it's because inquiry seems too different from what many teachers currently do in their classroom. Yes, inquiry is different, but that doesn't mean it's too hard to do.