Guided Inquiry


Book Description

This dynamic approach to an exciting form of teaching and learning will inspire students to gain insights and complex thinking skills from the school library, their community, and the wider world. Guided inquiry is a way of thinking, learning, and teaching that changes the culture of a school into a collaborative inquiry community. Global interconnectedness calls for new skills, new knowledge, and new ways of learning to prepare students with the abilities and competencies they need to meet the challenges of a changing world. The challenge for the information-age school is to educate students for living and working in this information-rich technological environment. At the core of being educated today is knowing how to learn and innovate from a variety of sources. Through guided inquiry, students see school learning and real life meshed in meaningful ways. They develop higher order thinking and strategies for seeking meaning, creating, and innovating. Today's schools are challenged to develop student talent, coupling the rich resources of the school library with those of the community and wider world. How well are you preparing your students to draw on the knowledge and wisdom of the past while using today's technology to advance new discoveries in the future? This book is the introduction to guided inquiry. It is the place to begin to consider and plan how to develop an inquiry learning program for your students.




A Guided Inquiry Approach to High School Research


Book Description

This book helps educators foster academic success and college readiness: it demonstrates how to instruct high school students to find, process, and think about new information, and then synthesize that knowledge. When students are able to manage topics of high interest by choosing their own subject matter, they learn how to effectively perform pre-collegiate research through a process that they find fun and rewarding. Ideal for high school-level teachers and school librarians, this book provides a unique, holistic approach to guided inquiry that guides students step-by-step through the cognitive, affective, and social processes involved, building critical study skills, time management strategies, collaboration techniques, and communication and presentation skills. A Guided Inquiry Approach to High School Research is derived from a formal research protocol and provides proven techniques and supporting materials that facilitate the process for permitting students to choose their own topic, easily grasping how to search for information, and successfully completing a seemingly daunting research assignment—a process that makes understandings deep and integrative. The included detailed project lessons, student handouts, and rubrics and assessment tools are the result of many years of classroom testing and refinement.




Guided Inquiry Design®


Book Description

Today's students need to be fully prepared for successful learning and living in the information age. This book provides a practical, flexible framework for designing Guided Inquiry that helps achieve that goal. Guided Inquiry prepares today's learners for an uncertain future by providing the education that enables them to make meaning of myriad sources of information in a rapidly evolving world. The companion book, Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, explains what Guided Inquiry is and why it is now essential now. This book, Guided Inquiry Design: A Framework for Inquiry in Your School, explains how to do it. The first three chapters provide an overview of the Guided Inquiry design framework, identify the eight phases of the Guided Inquiry process, summarize the research that grounds Guided Inquiry, and describe the five tools of inquiry that are essential to implementation. The following chapters detail the eight phases in the Guided Inquiry design process, providing examples at all levels from pre-K through 12th grade and concluding with recommendations for building Guided Inquiry in your school. The book is for pre-K–12 teachers, school librarians, and principals who are interested in and actively designing an inquiry approach to curricular learning that incorporates a wide range of resources from the library, the Internet, and the community. Staff of community resources, museum educators, and public librarians will also find the book useful for achieving student learning goals.




Guided Inquiry Design® in Action


Book Description

Supplying classroom-tested lessons and unit plans that can serve as templates, this book demonstrates exactly how to integrate and implement Guided Inquiry Design® (GID) theory into practice. Guided Inquiry is an approach that many educators—thought leaders and practitioners alike—are finding to be well-suited to information-age learning and a way to meet Common Core Standards. For many teachers, librarians, middle school leaders, and curriculum specialists, the biggest challenge is finding examples of guided inquiry in practice applicable to their own context. This guide offers an easy solution, offering ready-to-use templates and models for implementing Guided Inquiry Design® (GID) in the middle school learning environment. With each supplied lesson laid out according to the session plan templates from GID and a thorough description of the ideal inquiry process from beginning to end, integration and implementation of GID is attainable. Besides showing how to put GID to best use to achieve five kinds of learning through inquiry, the book provides an explicit structure for developing instructional partnerships and collaborative teams within the school and with the larger community. It enables teachers, school librarians, and other educational partners to consider and plan for achieving outcomes that bring about deep understanding while also addressing curricular goals. Readers will be better equipped to provide an authentic learning environment using collaboration, discussion, and reflection embedded in the sessions, thereby helping their students to be able to think creatively to solve problems.




A Guided Inquiry Approach to Teaching the Humanities Research Project


Book Description

Aligned with the Common Core, this book enables teachers and librarians to develop lessons and workshops as well as to teach high school students how to research and write a humanities paper using a guided inquiry approach. Being able to use the inquiry process to successfully research, write, and prepare papers and others types of presentations is not only necessary for a student's preparation for collegiate work, but is truly a requisite life skill. This book provides a solid guided inquiry curriculum for cultivating the skills needed to properly investigate a subject in the humanities, interrogate both textual and non-textual sources, interpret the information, develop an understanding of the topic, and effectively communicate one's findings. It is a powerful and practical guide for high school humanities teachers, school librarians, community college humanities teachers and librarians, and early college-level humanities instructors as well as for high school and college students who want to learn how to conduct and write up humanities research. Part one comprises a teacher's practicum that explains the power of guided inquiry. Part two contains student's workshops with instructions and materials to conduct a guided humanities project and paper on the high school level. The third part provides materials for a professional development session for this assignment as well as assessment tools and other supplementary materials such as student handouts. Based on the authors' 15 years' experience in teaching guided inquiry, the 20 workshops in the book use a step-by-step, constructivist strategy for teaching a sophisticated humanities project that enables college readiness.




Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards


Book Description

Humans, especially children, are naturally curious. Yet, people often balk at the thought of learning scienceâ€"the "eyes glazed over" syndrome. Teachers may find teaching science a major challenge in an era when science ranges from the hardly imaginable quark to the distant, blazing quasar. Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards is the book that educators have been waiting forâ€"a practical guide to teaching inquiry and teaching through inquiry, as recommended by the National Science Education Standards. This will be an important resource for educators who must help school boards, parents, and teachers understand "why we can't teach the way we used to." "Inquiry" refers to the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and in which students grasp science knowledge and the methods by which that knowledge is produced. This book explains and illustrates how inquiry helps students learn science content, master how to do science, and understand the nature of science. This book explores the dimensions of teaching and learning science as inquiry for K-12 students across a range of science topics. Detailed examples help clarify when teachers should use the inquiry-based approach and how much structure, guidance, and coaching they should provide. The book dispels myths that may have discouraged educators from the inquiry-based approach and illuminates the subtle interplay between concepts, processes, and science as it is experienced in the classroom. Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards shows how to bring the standards to life, with features such as classroom vignettes exploring different kinds of inquiries for elementary, middle, and high school and Frequently Asked Questions for teachers, responding to common concerns such as obtaining teaching supplies. Turning to assessment, the committee discusses why assessment is important, looks at existing schemes and formats, and addresses how to involve students in assessing their own learning achievements. In addition, this book discusses administrative assistance, communication with parents, appropriate teacher evaluation, and other avenues to promoting and supporting this new teaching paradigm.




How Students Learn


Book Description

How do you get a fourth-grader excited about history? How do you even begin to persuade high school students that mathematical functions are relevant to their everyday lives? In this volume, practical questions that confront every classroom teacher are addressed using the latest exciting research on cognition, teaching, and learning. How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom builds on the discoveries detailed in the bestselling How People Learn. Now, these findings are presented in a way that teachers can use immediately, to revitalize their work in the classroom for even greater effectiveness. Organized for utility, the book explores how the principles of learning can be applied in teaching history, science, and math topics at three levels: elementary, middle, and high school. Leading educators explain in detail how they developed successful curricula and teaching approaches, presenting strategies that serve as models for curriculum development and classroom instruction. Their recounting of personal teaching experiences lends strength and warmth to this volume. The book explores the importance of balancing students' knowledge of historical fact against their understanding of concepts, such as change and cause, and their skills in assessing historical accounts. It discusses how to build straightforward science experiments into true understanding of scientific principles. And it shows how to overcome the difficulties in teaching math to generate real insight and reasoning in math students. It also features illustrated suggestions for classroom activities. How Students Learn offers a highly useful blend of principle and practice. It will be important not only to teachers, administrators, curriculum designers, and teacher educators, but also to parents and the larger community concerned about children's education.




Guided Inquiry Design® in Action


Book Description

Edited by the cocreator of the Guided Inquiry Design® (GID) framework as well as an educator, speaker, and international consultant on the topic, this book explains the nuances of GID in the high school context. It also addresses background research and explains guided inquiry and the information search process. Today's students need to be able to think creatively to solve problems. They need to be in learning environments that incorporate collaboration, discussion, and genuine reflection to acquire these kinds of real-world skills. Guided Inquiry Design® in Action: High School gives teachers and librarians lesson plans created within the proven GID framework, specifically designed for high school students, and provides the supporting information and guidance to use these lesson plans successfully. You'll find the lesson plans and complete units of Guided Inquiry Design® clear and easy to implement and integrate into your existing curriculum, in all areas, from science to humanities to social studies. These teaching materials are accompanied by explanations of critical subjects such as the GID framework, using Guided Inquiry as the basis for personalized learning, using inquiry tools for assessment of learning in high school, and applying teaching strategies that increase student investment and foster critical thinking and deeper learning.




Euclidean Geometry


Book Description

Geometry has been an essential element in the study of mathematics since antiquity. Traditionally, we have also learned formal reasoning by studying Euclidean geometry. In this book, David Clark develops a modern axiomatic approach to this ancient subject, both in content and presentation. Mathematically, Clark has chosen a new set of axioms that draw on a modern understanding of set theory and logic, the real number continuum and measure theory, none of which were available in Euclid's time. The result is a development of the standard content of Euclidean geometry with the mathematical precision of Hilbert's foundations of geometry. In particular, the book covers all the topics listed in the Common Core State Standards for high school synthetic geometry. The presentation uses a guided inquiry, active learning pedagogy. Students benefit from the axiomatic development because they themselves solve the problems and prove the theorems with the instructor serving as a guide and mentor. Students are thereby empowered with the knowledge that they can solve problems on their own without reference to authority. This book, written for an undergraduate axiomatic geometry course, is particularly well suited for future secondary school teachers. In the interest of fostering a greater awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and everyday life, MSRI and the AMS are publishing books in the Mathematical Circles Library series as a service to young people, their parents and teachers, and the mathematics profession.




The Evolution of Inquiry


Book Description

Defining the progression toward inquiry learning, this book provides an extensive overview of the past five decades and the evolution of inquiry in science, history, language arts, and information literacy studies. Information inquiry is a basic skill for those who examine information as a science, and its principles can be applied across the K-12 curriculum. Built around reflective reviews of more than two dozen articles from School Library (Media Activities) Monthly, this helpful book shows the evolution, adoption, and application of the inquiry learning process to the school library teaching/learning environment. Four levels of inquiry—controlled, guided, open, and free—are explored in association with the emerging national Common Core curriculum and the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner from the American Association of School Librarians. With the growing interest in the concept of inquiry and inquiry learning, you may find yourself needing to distinguish between the existing models and their applications. To help you do that, the book provides you with rich, historical context that clarifies the models, and it also projects future applications of inquiry and learner-centered teaching through school information literacy programs. These new applications, such as graphic inquiry, argumentation for inquiry, and the student as information scientist, offer tangible examples you can use to enrich the expanding information literacy curriculum.