For my future vision project I have chosen the topic of Inquiry. I’ve chosen this topic because my school is starting a new grade 8 Inquiry cohort in September and I would like to contribute to the digital literacy aspect of inquiry as the teacher-librarian. I had a wonderful conversation with 5 other classmates who also chose inquiry as their topic today.
We discussed the meaning of inquiry and our roles as teachers of inquiry. The biggest focus of discussion was “how can TL’s help teachers use inquiry?” We came up with many questions we’d like to address for our individual projects. Some of these questions included: how do we come up with the guiding questions?, How do we create scaffolding sheets/rubrics?, How do we use technology for inquiry?, and how do we present our knowledge to teachers?
We also discussed some resources we could use to find out the answers to these questions. One major resource I already knew about was the Calgary Science school. The inquiry director in my district, Neil Stephenson, introduced me to the Calgary Science school last year. He was a former teacher at this school that is completely Inquiry-based.
It really helped to discuss our concerns as a group, in order to help decide what our individual focuses will be. My main goal with inquiry is to be the teacher and facilitator of information and digital literacy in the library when students come in with a project idea. Being in a high school and teaching senior students, I would like to help teach students to come up with there own guiding questions from a given topic. Most of the elementary teachers agreed that it was best to provide the guiding questions to younger questions but I feel senior students need to start making their own connections to inquiry. I would also like to educate all students on how to analyze and synthesis information they find on the web and to be socially responsible.
The question now is, how do I intend to do this using technology? Once I spend some more time researching what others have to say about inquiry and what they do to promote inquiry, I will make a final decision. But at this time, I am thinking about adding inquiry pages to my school library website. I am excited to see where the next week takes me!
I like this idea. As with many changes that come into education, they are often under-researched, implemented to quickly, they don’t work as they were supposed to, and then teachers revert to what has always worked for them. With a solid grounding in inquiry processes, as well as a fairly good idea of where challenges are likely to emerge, you will be well positioned to support teachers’ early attempts. As far as digital technologies go, I would think about technologies in multiple forms: technologies for communication, for research, for presenting findings, for sharing results, for discussing the process… There might be technologies specific to the inquiry topic, for example if a student was researching medical technology and presenting findings on MRI machines. Choosing technologies depends on at least two points of view – 1) your feeling of comfort using the technology (or feeling of comfort at your lack of comfort!); and 2) your teachers’ or students’ feeling of comfort using diverse technologies.