Wildwood Inquiry-Based Learning: Developing Student-Driven Questions (Transcript)

Georgia: I realize how much more they learn, so when I see that they take action and they’re applying the skills that they learn in here, I feel like I’ve done my job as a teacher.

At your service, all right.

Monica: Inquiry based learning is just a fancy word for curiosity, right? So tell me what child is not curious.

Georgia: We as humans all question, that’s how we learn. So the students should be questioning all the time.

Jonathan: Any questions?

Mary Beth: We’re trying to ignite passion and relevance. It’s not just about finishing that assignment, it’s about being able to explore something that I’m really interested in.

Monica: The basic steps in inquiry based learning is to come up with a rich question, a question that doesn’t have the answer already in it.

Georgia: You begin with the questions that you really want to explore in a unit, and then each unit has lines of inquiry that the students will be investigating. And the lines of inquiry are developed by the teacher but with a lot of input and feedback from the students.

Mary Beth: And that becomes the direction that the teacher takes the content, so the teacher will resource kids with opportunities to explore things that they’re interested in within that line of inquiry. So kids are hitting the standards with the bigger questions and being able to create evidence of their understandings and their learnings in all kinds of ways that the kids get to pick.

Georgia: So for instance, we’re doing a money unit right now, we’re studying billionaires. The theme billionaires was not chosen by the teachers per se, it stemmed from the students’ inquiries. When we were going through the inquiry process and they were asking all these questions, a common theme that kept coming up was, why are some people so rich and other people are not rich?

I remember a lot of you were wondering why some people don’t have as much money, remember that?

Students: Yeah.

Georgia: So those questions led to our investigation.

We had a huge discussion about why we’re studying billionaires and it’s not because they’re super humans or that they’re rich or they’re cool because they have a lot of money. We’re looking at character traits and we’re talking about what do these people have that enables them to be this successful?

Student: You’re doing a keynote about Ralph Lauren’s cars. He has a giant car collection.

Bobby: We’re asking ourselves some questions and then we would have looked on Wikipedia and searched up the questions. Maybe one day we want to invent something.

Student: This right here is how Warren Buffett influenced society about what he did, how much money he gave to charity.

Student: How about this one?

Teacher: Why would I really care about someone donating money to a charity?

Student: Because she helped someone and then she built a school for girls.

Mary Beth: We’re opening up learning by letting kids decide, “Hey, what am I really interested in science? What am I really interested in social studies? What am I really interested in literature?” giving them a whole list of potential things and letting them do the inquiry and research and make those connections.

Jonathan: So if you have a dystopia, you could say that Hunger Games would be one of your resources because it’s a fiction story that actually plays out in a dystopia region.

Inquiry based learning actually makes you think, essentially. You’re still doing it in the common core way, but you’re actually picking what you want to learn.

Mary Beth: All of a sudden, our students, we see our students doing things that really matter to them and they’re excited and they’re passionate and they want to talk about what they’re learning.

Monica: They’re inspired, they’re reflective, they struggle. That is a true education.

Schools That Work

Wildwood IB World Magnet School