Learning Through Inquiry

          For our second day of whole class instruction, my group members and I taught using an inquiry lesson.  This type of lesson requires students to actively participate and develop a deeper understanding of the concept or concepts being taught.  Teachers facilitate learning as students investigate questions and construct meaning.  For our lesson, we developed the following central focus: Students will investigate three modes of transportation used throughout the expansion westward and decide, after inquiry-based research, which mode they believe to be most efficient. We provided students with folders full of articles and pictures and posed the question “which mode of transportation do you think was the best choice?” 

          Before sending the students to work in their groups, we reviewed inquiry skills as follows: identify the problem, formulate a question, state a hypothesis collect data, test data, and draw conclusions.  Once this was completed, students began their investigations.  At the end of the lesson, each group presented about one folder, or mode of transportation.  The decision was pretty much unanimous that trains were the best mode of transportation!

          Teaching this lesson was more difficult than our direct instruction lesson because it was hard to keep the students on task.  They often got distracted by the timer on the front board and were arguing over which role to be responsible for.  While each group finished their tasks and came to a solid conclusion, it did not go as well as we would have hoped.  While we moved the folders from table to table instead of moving the children (which saved us from a lot of chaos!), the room still got a bit loud.  Overall, students successfully came to a conclusion to either support or refute their hypotheses, but dealing with classroom control certainly was a learning experience for us!