For several months now, the Faculty of Education has been focusing a lot on using inquiry in the classroom, and I’ve eventually begun seeing it used in different kinds of classrooms all around the world. At first, I had thought that inquiry was just a new method of teaching that was being implemented now, but after doing more reading and research for my own inquiry project, I now know that inquiry-based learning has been around for a long time.

Although I had a rather good idea of what inquiry-based learning was through all of the classes that we’ve had so far, it was really helpful to read the examples given at the beginning of chapter 1 in Focus on Inquiry. Thinking back to my own high school education, my favourite assignments had always been open-ended research projects that I could take in any direction I wanted. Those were the kinds of assignments that I gladly spent hours and hours working on without getting bored because I was actually interested in what I was learning. At the time, I didn’t realize that my teachers were using inquiry-based teaching methods; I had always assumed that it was less work for them to make more structured assignments for us to do. But now I understand that these were actually the best ways to teach the material. They taught us the necessary skills required for us to work on and research about the topics, but the actual learning was our own responsibility. And these methods worked! Some of my fondest and deepest memories about my high school education are about projects that I did; I remember the things that I learned doing those projects so much more than the things that I had to force myself to memorize for exams.

Through inquiry-based learning, I learned various important skills that I have carried with me since. I developed the metacognitive skills that are required for learners to keep learning, and this is definitely something that I want to teach my own students in the future.