Inquiry

This site is a must-see for teachers as excited as we are about inquiry-based learning.

Need ideas for discrepant events? Look no further than this site with additional helpful links included.

As a Chemistry teacher, I have found this book to be invaluable in my curriculum planning.

A discrepant event designed to illustrate a particular problem that students are intended to solve begins this model. Obviously, the effectiveness of the discrepant event at prompting student thinking is limited only by the teacher's own imagination. The instructor can be as inventive (or fool-hardy) as portraying an historical figure before the class to prompt a lesson on an event in history, or conducting a quick experiment whose results will "wow" students. How creative teachers can be in devising a discrepant event determines how well they can capture students' attention, draw them toward the problem at hand, and promote divergent thinking to solve the problem as students progress through the model. Creative thinking allows teachers and students to make connections between data, knowledge, other disciplines, etc. This is why Robinson insists that creativity must be infused into our students' learning--so we can leave the linear model behind.

-Jacob Clark

Inquiry allows for creativity and divergent thinking. In the extension phase of inquiry, students can connect their inquiry topic to many other topics and ideas. For example, while completing an inquiry activity, a student may come up with a new discrepant event to discover after completing analysis of data and the extension phase. The student may also discover a connection between the inquiry topic and a topic they have previously studied. If inquiry is completed in a science classroom, a student may have stumbled upon a new discovery. Some of most useful objects in the world were created/discovered by "mistake".

-Ashley Jones