Guest post by Shelly Vohra Ph.D., Instructional Coach, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Rethinking Learning Podcast Series Episode #3
Conversations with Shelly Vohra on Her Journey into Inquiry
Shelly Vohra, Ph.D. @raspberryberet3 shares with Barbara why inquiry connects learners to the real world. She shares how she helps teachers bring voice and choice into the classroom. Shelly shares her story and ideas in the post below.
My journey into inquiry started almost ten years ago. I remember sitting in my Grade 5 classroom at the end of the year, exhausted and thinking, “There has to be a better way to teach the curriculum!”
Connecting Subjects
My main goal was for my students to recognize that the subjects were connected. For example, how are science, geography, language, math, connected to each other? These are not isolated subjects nor are they an island on their own. There are many opportunities for cross-curricular integration, and I had designed and delivered many lessons where students were learning in this manner. However, I felt there was a more effective method in which students could explore issues, topics, and concepts in an integrated fashion, where there were more choices and voice for students. Additionally, as someone who values social justice and equity issues, I wanted to find a way to ensure that social justice was integrated into the teaching and learning.
One of My Best Learning Experiences
I never thought the journey that I started that summer would end up being one of the best learning experiences of my life! I remember sitting at my parent’s kitchen table (I was still living at home at this time) with all the curriculum documents spread out in front of me and doing a scavenger hunt of sorts. I was searching for ways in which the expectations in one subject area overlapped with expectations from other subject areas. I was not only looking at the expectations per se, but I was also examining the skills/verbs that were common amongst the different subjects.
For example, how many times did the verbs “analyze, judge, evaluate, and justify” appear in the various curricular areas? I started with the science and social studies curricula since they would be the best ones in which the “big ideas” would come to light. My next step was to generate a list of these “life big ideas” (as I like to call them) and related questions (which we now know as “essential questions” or “driving questions”). Since I was teaching grade 6 the following year, my first big idea was “Development” and my related essential question was, “Should Canada continue to invest in space exploration?” I spent the next few weeks planning this unit; designing lessons, looking up resources, mapping out assessment strategies, and drafting a newsletter to parents about the unit. There are different levels of questions and this is another thing I have learned as my learning progressed. For example, the question above is a yes/no question and might be considered a lower level type of inquiry question. It is important, however, that these questions become even more open-ended as students become accustomed to learning through the inquiry process.
Using the Inquiry Method
This type of approach to teaching and learning allows students to use the inquiry method. They are introduced to the big idea and essential question and some initial discussions occur in our “community circle”. Students then engage in their learning by accessing the necessary resources (books, newspaper articles, websites, magazine articles, etc) to answer the question. This is not to say that there is no explicit teaching happening during the unit; of course, there is! These explicit lessons just need to be planned carefully in terms of what information is being disseminated to students and when it is being disseminated in the learning cycle.
