Inquiry Simulator

So you know that, even though you know next nothing about the topic, your teacher lives in the space. When they're not at school, they're involved in the topic in some way. I would be a fool not to pick his brain. Maybe something will stick. You go and talk to the teacher and get some hints.

As a teacher, this can be a tricky assignment. When the subject matter is close to your heart, you feel a pull between telling the students what to think, because you've spent so much time with it, and letting them connect with the topic in their own way by giving them less guidance. In our research, this scenario played out in two different ways, one brilliantly successful with a hint at topic ending up in a detailed presentation from a thoroughly engaged student, and the other never really connected and ended up with a less focused project that made some good connections, but the student had a hard time engaging with the topic. Both projects are in the examples section of the site. We'll let you figure out which they are!

Perhaps the biggest realization that we made, with the help of early looks at the Guided Inquiry Design model was that the students need time to explore in order to gain enough knowledge to know what a meaningful connection to the topic might look like. They need to surf the web, read Wikipedia articles and sit around and talk about the topic so that they know enough to be able to start to really go deep. Too often we, expect them to be able to connect to the topic from the get go and get disappointed with shallow, unfocused displays of their learning. In our second iteration of the resarch project with this Grade 11 Social Studies class, we simply spent two or three classes before the Christmas break sitting around the Learning Commons, pulling books off shelves, surfing the web and bouncing ideas off of each other. While Guided Inquiry Design suggests more structured ways of doing this that might well have been more effective, this was definitely a step in the right direction and we immediately noticed students connecting to topics at a deeper level when they returned from their break. They knew what the didn't know.

The teacher is really trying hard to connect me to the topic in some way that I can relate to. I take the teacher's word for it and go down what I think is the suggested path.
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Bla, bla, bla, bla. What the heck is he talking about? I'm more lost than I was before!
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I don't know, I hear what he's saying but I really can't see a connection here. I'm going to pick something at random and go for it. I can't waste too much time just picking the topic...
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