Inquiry

Every public school teacher I've seen seems to agree that the school year needs to be split up into manageable, themed chunks: units.  What they don't seem to agree on is how these units should be organized and what kind of themes they should have.  English classrooms often have a poetry unit, a Shakespeare unit, an argument writing unit.  A language class might follow a textbook with themed chapters: food, travel, politics, history.  More recently, though, I've heard a lot of talk about organizing a unit around inquiry: an "essential question."

I had never been a student in a class organized around inquiry until I got to college, and I do like the experience. It's been much more intellectually stimulating for me, and it helps students realize why they're learning something, which is a question student are always asking themselves.  Thinking about this reminds me of the way one of my other classes is structured this semester.  I'm taking Physics 105: Stars and Cosmology.  This class is incredibly interesting to me, but I'm such a conceptual person that the nitty-gritty part of physics (equations, calculations, etc.) is really hard.  Something cool is happening, though: my professor is organizing the class around conceptual things, and then teaching us the messy details when we realize we need to know them to fully understand the bigger concepts.  Here's an example:  It's organized around a question: if the only data we can get from astronomical objects is the light they put out, how can we figure out things like what temperature a star is, or what it's made out of?  At the moment we're learning about spectroscopy, which is a way that scientists can figure out what elements stars, nebulas, and other astronomical objects contain. To do this it's necessary to get into things as detailed as atomic structure and how electrons behave.  If my professor had started out the class with atomic structure, I would have had no idea why we were learning it, because at first glance it has nothing to do with astronomy.  But, because she presented a problem to figure out and atomic structure as the solution, we students have bought into knowing those complicated details. Details are hard for students to process if they don't know why they have to learn them, but if we can present them as the products of inquiry, the students will feel much better about them and learn more.  The other thing I like about this way of teaching is that it mimics the thought processes of professionals in the field.  Astrophysicists don't sit down and say, "I wonder, if I start studying atoms, what they can tell me about quasars?"  Instead, they ask, "How can I figure out the things I want to know about quasars with the information I can get?" They find out through some creativity and a process of inquiry that knowing about atoms will help them achieve their goal.  This way of thinking is genuine, and students will feel that.

That was a long explanation about an astronomy class, but that process of inquiry can work for any subject.  I think it also works really well with the Common Core State Standards, especially the way we've been talking about them in class, with designing instruction around multiple areas within language arts.  It would be easy to look at the common core and say, "oh good, I can have a Writing unit, and a Speaking/Listening Unit, and a Informational Text unit...", but if we organize a unit instead around an essential question, we can pull in standards from all these different areas, students will use different thought processes and media to explore their ideas and answer that question, and the learning experience will be much more holistic and useful.