Lesson Strategies
Effective Inquiry-based Lessons
It is a misconception
that inquiry refers to unguided/unstructured lessons. In an inquiry lesson, everyone in the
class is placed in the position of knowledge holder, with the teacher introducing
the concept/idea and guiding the students’ progress, keeping them on track,
and planning the lesson
to meet specific goals.
- Clearly communicate goals to parents, administrators and kids so that everyone will know exactly what you are looking for and what you value from this lesson.
- Once you have determined the main goals, structure the process of the lesson to fit the goals. But remember that:
- The process should be chosen that best fits the goals.
- The children need to be taught the norms for working individually, in pairs, or in groups. Thus you are not only teaching content, but process—the lesson plan should reflect all those goals. Caution: Do not jump into group work without scaffolding the process. Just assigning jobs doesn’t do it!!!
- If this is the first time you are presenting a particular process, then you will need to plan for extra time to teach the process. This should include:
- Modeling of some sort.
- Visual reminder of the steps involved and/or the rules for this form
of learning—this can be used to remind the children of the norms
each time you use this process in the future.
- Lesson goals can and should be multi-dimensional. Are the goals of your lesson to (1) Teach skills and procedures? (2) Discover what students know about a concept? (3) Encourage students to use problem solving skills? (4) Have students communicate the solution process used? (5) Teach learning process?
- Teaching skills and procedures can be done using an inquiry lesson where alternative methods are valued. Asking the children to share their methods for solving a problem can be used as formative assessment.
- Discovering what children already know about a concept is an excellent diagnostic lesson for determining the conceptual level of prior knowledge. This can be used instead of a pretest and can provide very rich material for planning a unit or for a comparison sample of student work in a portfolio.
- Problem solving skills can be encouraged to solve complex, multi-step problems and real-world data. This builds connections and also allows children to apply alternative solution methods. It also teaches students to work through multilevel tasks.
- When students are asked to communicate their understanding of a concept
or solution process, they should be guided to think about the audience.
Is this for a WASL test, for their classmates or students in their group
to understand, for the teacher to evaluate, or for parents and community
to observe? Whenever we write, make a poster, or give a presentation we
need to be aware of the audience.
- The children need to understand the goals of working individually, in
pairs, or in groups. They should know how they are being evaluated
for these skills.
Group Work Strategies
- Think-Pair-Share
- Groups can be used to teach study skills, to collect data, and/or to share complicated tasks.
- Jobs assigned for group work should have all students involved in thinking
about the math—do not delegate students to do superficial tasks.
- Most effective when collecting a lot of different pieces of information
to be compared or analyzed. This improves efficiency by cutting down
on the time and labor involved in collecting the materials individually.
Students pool their resources and discuss the problem together.
- Group work can start out with children working individually (collecting
data, trying out a problem, etc.), and then sharing with the group or coming
to consensus. The final product can be group produced or done individually,
dependent upon the audience.
- A group usually ranges in size from 2 to 6 students, but be careful to assign enough students to do the job in the time allotted, and so that all members are actively involved at all times. (Be careful not to assign jobs to individuals that run sequentially, but rather are to be done concurrently.)
- Jigsaw is a form
of group work that is especially useful when learning/reviewing a lot of information.
Students are assigned to an expert group and to a study group. In the
expert group they work together to learn the material and decide upon the
best methods for teaching/sharing the information with their study groups.
They then are split up so that one student from each of the expert groups
is placed in a different study group. Each person shares what they have
learned with the students in their study group.
- This is a useful process to use at the end of a complex unit, with older
children, to teach study skills.
- Since learning is done using a group process, a group test may be appropriate.
- Group tests usually consist of three distinct segments: (1) Individual work on a few complex problems, (2) group time to confer with others about what they have come up with, (3) individual time to construct final solutions and explanations.
- Group presentations usually have seven distinct components:
- Class discussion about project that includes development/presentation of scoring rubric,
- Group members are assigned and confer to decide upon collection/analysis
process,
- Individual preparation/collection work,
- Group discussion of best method to present findings and document the work process,
- Preparation of presentation materials and documentation,
- Actual presentation,
- Individual reflection on what was learned from group work.
- Assessment/evaluation should match the learning process. If learning
process is accomplished by working in groups, then the assessment process
should be similarly structured.
Caution: If the group portion of the lesson is to collect material or make a presentation, this may not be the learning process but rather the preparation and presentation process.
Prepared by UW TEP program participants.