Background: We began our 5 year journey by learning about different inquiry-based curricula and strategies. This was intentional, and its impact was enormous! We were excited by the methods, from LBC to Modeling, to PBI, and more. We were inspired by the teachers we observed. We were forced to confront how we learned, and think about how much more we might know, if only our teachers all taught us like that! Those of us already in classrooms thought, “Do I do this?!” And so Inquiry, with a capital I, felt like the most important, most effective, and most organic way to teach physics. A student who learns any other way isn’t learning how to DO science. We discounted and discredited other ways of teaching, or at least believed that, even though we used other methods all the time, we must have been doing it wrong.
We felt this way when we began our lesson study, and the result was an open Inquiry lab that vaguely pointed students in the right direction, but did not guarantee the content goal we had in mind, the relationship between kinetic energy and velocity.
Lesson One:Every lesson should start with a statement of specific learning goals. Only after goals have been set can an appropriate set of learning activities be created at a level of inquiry appropriate to those goals.
Balancing Inquiry with Learning Goals
Background: We began our 5 year journey by learning about different inquiry-based curricula and strategies. This was intentional, and its impact was enormous! We were excited by the methods, from LBC to Modeling, to PBI, and more. We were inspired by the teachers we observed. We were forced to confront how we learned, and think about how much more we might know, if only our teachers all taught us like that! Those of us already in classrooms thought, “Do I do this?!” And so Inquiry, with a capital I, felt like the most important, most effective, and most organic way to teach physics. A student who learns any other way isn’t learning how to DO science. We discounted and discredited other ways of teaching, or at least believed that, even though we used other methods all the time, we must have been doing it wrong.
We felt this way when we began our lesson study, and the result was an open Inquiry lab that vaguely pointed students in the right direction, but did not guarantee the content goal we had in mind, the relationship between kinetic energy and velocity.
Lesson One: Every lesson should start with a statement of specific learning goals. Only after goals have been set can an appropriate set of learning activities be created at a level of inquiry appropriate to those goals.
Links to Evidence and Supporting Documents:
The evolution of our goal
Levels of Inquiry matrix created during the Lesson Study process
Next lesson learned
Home