Curious brain, a set of inquiry questions and my first TEDx coming up

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on the Elementary Connected Classrooms (ECC) blog about how a student prompted me to think. It was a full-on, stop in my tracks, instantly-forgot-everything-else-I-was-thinking-about moment and one of the coolest side effects of it was that the student who caused me to stop and think watched me process through the whole thing. He absolutely knew that he was the reason for making his teacher start a learning project. His ownership of the whole thing is pretty amazing.

As the questions are closely related to the upcoming TEDxWestVancouverED (more coming on this later in the post), I wanted to share the questions that I typed out as Evander watched my curious brain think the questions through. Here they are:

  1. How do other teachers ‘teach’ inquiry-based learning?
  2. Are there any good articles, books, blogs, etc. on inquiry that I can read and share with my ECC colleagues?
  3. Are there any good examples of students’ inquiry projects online that I can share with my colleagues and students?
  4. How can I capture the amazing learning my students have done through their inquiry projects to show other students in upcoming years?
  5. What are the strengths of the ECC inquiry project?
  6. What are the aspects of the ECC inquiry project that we can improve upon?
  7. What are my colleagues doing that is working really well?
  8. How can I make the ECC inquiry project even better?
  9. How can I better communicate to parents how this project works and what it’s all about?
  10. What other ways can I narrow this topic to learn more?
I think I’m going to start a google doc with this right now so that I can actually start working through it. I can see now that a number of the questions are very similar and I’m already wondering how deep I can go on this professional learning project.
A good sign of how excited I am to learn about this is that I’ve already started gathering resources. The ECC team is going to read Learning in Depth together, book club style, and have, I’m sure, some great conversations starting in the late summer on that book.
The most exciting part of all this for me, at the moment, is that this weekend I am lucky to be attending TEDxWestVancouverEd and several of the speakers and attendees have been working with inquiry in the classroom for a few years. I cannot wait to meet these wonderful people that, up until this point, have been virtual colleagues, people I learn from online but have not yet been able to talk with face to face. I’m also very interested to finally see, and hopefully meet, Dean Shareski. I’ve been reading his blog and enjoying his tweets for years and I can’t wait to see him start off the day on Saturday.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *