MST PORTAL – Promoting Open, Reflective Teaching & Learning

According to the National Science Education Standards students at all grade levels and in every domain of science should have the opportunity to use scientific inquiry and develop the ability to think and act in ways associated with inquiry, including asking questions, planning and conducting investigations, using appropriate tools and techniques to gather data, thinking critically and logically about relationships between evidence and explanations, constructing and analyzing alternative explanations, and communicating scientific arguments.

Teaching science as inquiry requires teachers to shift their instructional design from showing and telling to providing opportunities for students to observe, share ideas, grapple with discrepant events, ask their own questions, and discover ways to collect and analyze data, conduct research, and ask new questions based on their discoveries. Inquiry is messy, open-ended, and often time consuming. Yet this student-centered approach is essential if we want our students truly understand key scientific concepts.

Today I worked with 3 classes participating in our HP grant project, Pond Partners, and the goal was to have students develop their own questions to investigate out in the field as part of this project. It wasn’t easy. The classroom teachers and I had to continuously probe their thinking, model how to ask questions, and focus students’ attention on the purpose of the project. We choose to guide and direct their inquiry rather than have the experience be completely open. While this may not always be the best approach, given our time constraints and project outline, it was our best option. If by the end of the year students can ask relevant scientific questions, these guiding steps will have been well worth the effort.