This week one of the lessons I observed was on inquiry. First off I was very surprised to hear that the students would be doing their own inquiry project as I thought it may be a little out of their learning zone. I was very interested to learn how it was going to work. First the teacher had the student’s think of things that they wanted to know the answers to. They came up with a lot of different, good questions. She then explained the project, which is that they each pick a question they would like to know more about. They then are going to do research to answer the question. She briefly talked about the different ways of researching with them; I would think that she would go into this part more during this specific lesson. After the have gathered their research and created a project they are going to have an inquiry fair with the entire school where they will have the opportunity to share and see others projects.
After the project was explained the students went to their desks and were to come up with three questions they had. I noticed that this was hard for some students who were constantly erasing and writing a question similar to one of their peers. Some of the questions were very interesting and surprised me coming from some of the students. This is as far as we got on this lesson but the next part is to start narrowing their questions down to just one.
I think that this project will demonstrate how hard some students will work when they are passionate about the topic. It shows the importance of students having a bit of a choice in what they are learning. I also thought that this was great for me to observe as I am working on my inquiry project as well.