EDIM 513 Week 3_Thoughts On IBL After 3 Weeks

So far this has been a great three weeks of class on Inquiry Based Learning. I previously stated in my last post that I went through an IBL training with an outside company my district hired and I didn't have that great of an experience with it. Within the first three weeks I have become much more excited and motivated to try new forms of inquiry. My previous training and administrators kept idolizing the idea of inquiry so much that they both made it a point for it to be used all the time, large projects, and making the lessons extremely student-directed. This was not only frustrating, but put a great deal of pressure on the students and teachers to perform well so it wasn't a waste of valuable class time. This pressure really disrupts trust and the community within your classroom. Inquiry lessons are hard enough at first for students to grasp not only the concept, but reason why the teacher is doing it this way as well. Not to mention the internal struggle it brings the teacher to hold back the answers from the students.

Last week's discussion about creating a sense of community within the classroom was a helpful discussion. Although I feel that I am fortunate enough to have pretty mature / respectful students for their age and a well establish sense of community within my classroom, I find it to always be beneficial to hear other teacher's methods, ideas, and experiences. I especially enjoy listening to more seasoned teacher's words of advice because they have experienced a great deal more than I have with all of the changes our society has gone through within the past decade or so. The technology boom has really changed schooling and can make or break the classroom environment. Just last week, my school went 1 to 1 with all of the freshman as a pilot. Within one week, so teachers were so stressed out from trying to manage the new environment that was created that they couldn't even teach a lesson. Last week's discussion also heavy touched upon the abilities and understanding of inquiry as well as backing inquiry with the importance of enhancing our student's processing skills. Although I already have been well versed on processing skills and their importance, it was refreshing to read up on more information regarding the necessity of acquiring them.

I think the best week of them all so far though was this week (week 3). This week entailed the reading and analyzing of three different case study classroom lessons. I found it intriguing and interesting to see the difference of opinions between myself and others within the class. It either means that both of us are correct with shades of grey, I am completely wrong or right, or that we all still have more learning to do to really understand inquiry. I have a feeling it is the last one of these three though...Besides the case studies, we were given a documentary style video of an IBL classroom activity. At first I was a little distraught that I had to sit through a 52 minute long video, but once I started to watch it, I loved it. I thought the lesson, the video, and how the students learned was the utmost best inquiry lesson I have witnessed yet. The physics teacher that I co-teach with is doing optics in a few weeks. He normally uses lasers and other things to teach it. He explained to me that most of the students are excited to do the experiments but have a hard time grasping the concepts. I think that instilling or replicating a similar conversation that the teacher in the video had at the beginning of the lesson with his students, would greatly increase the seriousness and synthesis of past knowledge to the experiments.

All in all, I am excited to learn more and be able to expand my current lessons. The only burning question that I still have is the same that I posted about in my first blog. I stated earlier in this posting the podium that my administration has sometimes put on our inquiry lessons. I also mentioned in my previous blog the amount of time large inquiry lessons take / the lack of time provided for the year. This still leaves me with the burning question of how can teachers and a district balance the time it takes to achieve what the states are now assessing their teachers on with the lack of time that we have to cover the amount of material that we need to?