This week the course focussed on classroom community, abilities and understandings, and the essential learning skills. Reflecting on the topic of classroom community leaves me feeling confident and satisfied. I feel that I have an excellent grasp on creating a wonderful environment for my students. My students are respected, praised, and encouraged, they are taught to understand and appreciate others, and I love being a part of it. It's this type of environment that lends itself well to successful inquiry based lessons.
Through the abilities and understandings activity I learned that creating a lesson that focusses on inquiry is a challenge, but still fun. The lesson design helps students question, investigate, and evaluate data. The lesson design is fun, as well as the lesson, it's keeps all involved engaged.
The process skills, or the skills utilized during inquiry based lessons are essential, and students can practice them by participating in inquiry lessons. They are automatic and naturally occurring, which makes them easy to grasp. With more and more exposure, students can grow with these skills.
With new growth and knowledge comes more understanding, and for me that means inquiry based learning is becoming less difficult to describe and understand. These ideas help me get more of a grasp upon this learning style, and are leading to new ideas about how to use inquiry in my own classroom.
I know you teach a much younger age group and this week is probably the focus of inquiry for your classroom. It is difficult to go beyond addressing specific process skills and abilities and understandings in your classroom just due to the developmental level of your students. That is fine. I encourage you when we talk of inquiry applications to our classrooms to really focus on specific skills that you can address with your students.
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